Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Technology”
Privacy rights and open internet advocates are sounding the alarm after Facebook on Monday announced changes to its “free” Internet for the developing world, dubbed Internet.org, which critics say threatens to make the social networking company the de facto Internet “gatekeeper” for hundreds of millions worldwide. Branded as an initiative to “connect the two thirds of the world that doesn’t …
For the last six months, I have been working hard on the development of a breakthrough search engine that will finally offer a credible search alternative to the NSA-funded, surveillance-state search engines currently dominating the web. Next week, I’ll be opening the webmaster URL submit page for the world’s first independent, anti-propaganda search engine that filters out corporate propaganda and …
We all know from first-hand experience that the digital age has most of us “plugged in” 24/7. What is the detrimental impact on parents and children of being “plugged in” to digital devices—or in front of a television screen—both day and night? New studies show that turning off the television, unplugging other digital devices, and reading a book before bedtime can: improve a child’s brain function, mental imagery, imagination, theory of mind …
The mythic role assigned to progress in today’s popular culture has any number of odd effects, but one of the strangest is the blindness to the downside that clamps down on the collective imagination of our time once people become convinced that something or other is the wave of the future. It doesn’t matter in the least how many or …
On the afternoon of Friday, March 27, as several news outlets reported at the time, somebody apparently made $2.4 million from a tweet. That tweet was a bit of breaking news from Wall Street Journal writer Dana Mattioli: Quicker than any human seemingly could have done it, someone—or rather something—bought $110,530 worth of cheap options on Altera, a company that makes digital circuits.* Over the next several …
The information war can be quickly lost if one cannot get their assets onto the “battlefield.” For the US, UK or Europe, the constant din of their propaganda spread across the planet via their impressive and immense media networks has recently run into a few snags. In nations like Russia, China or Iran, ruling governments and local industry have begun …
A new class action lawsuit claims Facebook violated its users’ privacy rights in acquiring what it describes as the largest privately held database of facial recognition data in the world. According to a report from Courthouse News Service, lead plaintiff Carlo Licata, of Cook County, claims the social network violated Illinois privacy laws by not providing him with written notification that his biometric …
Late February the Finnish publication Iltalehti published a sensational news headline about conspiracy theories: Now it is proven: conspiracy theorists are fools living in a bubble The internet is the information highway for both good and bad, because on the net all content is equal and trustworthy content competes for attention among all kinds of misinformation. Among other things, conspiracy theories and the peddling …
A Phalanx close-in weapons system (CIWS), which Human Rights Watch calls a prototype for fully autonomous weapons—or “killer robots”—fires at sea. (Photo: U.S. Navy/flickr/cc) Fully autonomous weapons, or “killer robots,” present a legal and ethical quagmire and must be banned before they can be further developed, a new human rights report published Thursday urges ahead of next week’s United Nations …
Surely you have noticed: A lot of people who have no idea what they are talking about are oddly certain of their superior knowledge. While this disconnect has been a problem throughout human history, new research suggests a ubiquitous feature of our high-tech world—the Internet—has made matters much worse. In a series of studies, a Yale University research team led by psychologist Matthew …
