NewsTrust - Computers - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

America’s Coming Space Wars

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Informed Comment - By Alfred W. McCoy - Nov. 09 (Opinion) - It’s 2025 and an American “triple canopy” of advanced surveillance and armed drones fills the heavens from the lower- to the exo-atmosphere. A wonder of the modern age, it can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed, knock out an enemy’s satellite communications system, or follow individuals biometrically for great distances. Along with the country’s advanced cyberwar capacity, it’s also the most sophisticated militarized information system ever created and an insurance policy for U.S. global dominion deep into the twenty-first century. It’s the future as the Pentagon imagines it; it’s under development; and Americans know nothing about it.

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Harpers Magazine cover story: "How to Rig an Election"

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Kos - By Ivorysteve - Oct. 16 (Review) - My copy of the November Harper's Magazine arrived today, with a surprisingly front-and-center article on the state of America's vote-counting technology. It's a well-researched piece, with much of it depressingly familiar to many progressives who followed the tin-foil-hat-tainted theories of the 2004 election. It reviews the recent history some of us know: the ESS&S / Diebold coziness, Bev Harris and hackable GEMS system, the Help America Vote Act Trojan horse, Chuck Hegal, Max Cleland, the exit poll disparities in Ohio and elsewhere in 2004 that all exhibited a "red shift" to the Right. The article then brings things up to date.

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The Federated Web Should Be Easier Than It Sounds

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Klint Finley - Aug. 04 (Opinion) - The Federated Web Should Be Easier Than It Sounds

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Journalism: The best of times, and the worst of times

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

GigaOM - By Mathew Ingram - Jun. 03 (Interview) - Journalism professor Tim McGuire, a long-time newspaper editor and Pulitzer Prize judge, says there is much upheaval in the media industry but a lot of potential as well -- provided media entities give up their gatekeeper role and learn to serve their readers better.

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Behind the US/Israeli Cyberattacks on Iran

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Informed Comment - By Juan Cole - Jun. 03 (Opinion) - Megha Rajagopalan writes at ProPublica The New York Times [has] published a report detailing how the Bush and Obama administrations created the cyberweapon known as Stuxnet and used it to disrupt Iran’s uranium enrichment program. Much has been written about Stuxnet, which, as ProPublica recently reported, remains a threat beyond Iran.

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25 years of HyperCard—the missing link to the Web

Thu, 31 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Matthew Lasar - May. 31 (Opinion) - This month, I glanced at my historical watch. HyperCard will soon be 25, I noticed. What ever happened to it? I searched around and found venture entrepreneur and coder Tim Oren's 2004 eulogy for the program, written the week that Apple withdrew the software from the market. HyperCard's problem, he argued, was that Apple never quite figured out what the software was for. "What was this thing?" Oren wrote. "Programming and user interface design tool? Lightweight database and hypertext document management system? Multimedia authoring environment? Apple never answered that question."

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Google’s ‘Project Glass’ Augmented Reality Glasses Are Real And In Testing

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - Apr. 04 (Opinion) - After weeks of speculation and rumors, Google has officially pulled back the curtain on what they have come to call Project Glass -- a pair of augmented reality glasses that seek to provide users real-time information right in front of their eyes. "We think technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t," wrote Babak Parviz, Steve Lee, and Sebastian Thrun, three Google employees who are part of the Google X skunkworks. "We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input." Something tells me that they won't be hurting for feedback.

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Mike Daisey: Reports of my Death have been Greatly Exaggerated

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

mikedaisey.blogspot.com - By Mike Daisey - Mar. 20 (Opinion) - In the last forty-eight hours I have been equated with Stephen Glass, James Frey, and Greg Mortenson. Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoke to any workers. Especially galling is how many are gleefully eager to dance on my grave expressly so they can return to ignoring everything about the circumstances under which their devices are made. Given the tone, you would think I had fabulated an elaborate hoax, filled with astonishing horrors that no one had ever seen before. Except that we all know that isn’t true.

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Pair Programming Considered Harmful?

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

TechCrunch - By Jon Evans - Mar. 03 (Opinion) - Coding has always been seen as lone-ranger work; witness the opening scene in The Social Network. Despite managers’ dreams of programmers as fungible units, it’s nearly universally accepted that a great developer is ten times as productive as a mediocre one, and/or that a small team of the software equivalent of the Special Forces can code rings around an army of hundreds of grunts. The flip side is that one cowboy coder’s bad decisions can cripple you — maybe immediately, or maybe next year, when you suddenly discover that your organization has quietly racked up so much technical debt that it has become the software equivalent of Greece.

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True Or False? Automatic Fact-Checking Coming To The Web – Complications Follow

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

TechCrunch - By Devin Coldewey - Nov. 29 (Opinion) - The social layer has settled on the web like a dusting of multicolored snowflakes, gracing every story with a little menagerie of sharing counts and buttons. Once basic standards of content publishing were established, basic standards of sharing had to be as well, the internet being as it is a medium of information transmission. First you get the content, then you move it around. We’re still working on the moving around part.

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Occupy PressThink: Tim Pool

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Press Think - By Jay Rosen, Alexis Madrigal - Nov. 21 (Opinion) - “Being a livestream he acts as ‘eyes and ears’ for the viewers. Literally. People will tell him to move the camera somewhere and he’ll do it. They’ll ask for interviews with someone, and Tim will go over and do so… The viewers will ask him questions and he won’t rest until he gets them their answers.” Recently, Alexis Madrigal, the technology editor of The Atlantic and pretty much the smartest young journalist ’round these parts, re-described occupy Wall Street as an API, or Application Programming Interface.

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Best Media Watchdog Experiment: NewsTrust

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

City Paper - Sep. 21 (Editorial) - We got used to NewsTrust Baltimore’s e-mails very quickly. More than a thoughtful amalgam of Baltimore stories from around the web, the alerts came with an invitation to think about the stories in a critical way and comment via a strict form included on the site. Inveterate web commenters might at first be offended by this kind of formalism, but it worked: The idea of rating which news sources are “trustworthy” is, of course, not new. But in using this form to guide self-selected readers, NewsTrust helped its readers (and itself) understand something about the news ecosystem from the point of view of both newsmakers and consumers. NewsTrust, launched via a now-concluded six-month pilot program but with its site still active, was filled with thoughtful, constructive criticism of stories and articles both local and global, and was blessedly devoid of moronic flame wars. In this age of partisan rancor, that is no small thing.

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Facebook's Mysterious Hire: The Guy Who Designed Much of the iPhone

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Marshall Kirkpatrick - Aug. 03 (Opinion) - Matas wasn't just one of many Apple designers; he designed many of the key interfaces you probably interact with every day if you own an iPhone, an iPad or a Mac.

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Think Talks with the Group That Hacked A Fox News Twitter Account

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Think SB - By Adam Peck - Jul. 04 (Interview) - Perhaps deciding on a different strategy, The Script Kiddies have scrubbed all past mentions of their hack of the Fox News Politics Twitter account and replaced them with alarming and, most importantly, fake accounts of President Obama’s death. The updates have jarred quite a few readers–us included–who saw the news coming from what they believed to be an authentic Fox News source.

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Telcos could be the key to Twitter’s revenue model

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

GigaOM - By Sam Ramji - Jun. 26 (Interview) - At WWDC this year Apple and Twitter announced a new partnership to bring Twitter to iOS devices. While this is impressive, the total number of new iOS users is dwarfed by the number of people who use feature phones worldwide. So how will services like Twitter bridge this opportunity gap?

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Is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg Tone Deaf About Privacy?

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Writing Corner - By Beth Wellington - Jun. 15 (Opinion) - Remember the uproar when Facebook made your list of friends, pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region and networks publicly available to everyone? Now, the social networking behemoth has silently enabled facial recognition software without your permission under the rather benign tag "Suggest photos of me to friends." Even if you choose to disable the option, Facebook still will have the technical ability to connect your name with your image.

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Flipboard: Threat and Opportunity

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Monday Note - By Frédéric Filloux - Apr. 17 (Opinion) - Every media company should be afraid of Flipboard. The Palo Alto startup epitomizes the best and the worst of the internet. The best is for the user. The worst is for the content providers that feed its stunning expansion without getting a dime in return. According to Kara Swisher ‘s AllThingsD, nine months after launching its first version, Flipboard’s new $50m financing round gives the company a €200m valuation. Many newspapers or magazines carrying hundreds of journalists can’t get a €200m valuation today. Last year, for the Groupe Le Monde, an investment bank memo set a valuation of approximately $100m (net of its $86m debt at the time, to be precise). That was for a 644 journalists multimedia company – OK, one that had been badly managed for years. Still, Flipboard is a 32-people startup with a single product and no revenue yet. So, what’s the fuss about? The answer is a simple one: Flipboard is THE product any big media company or, better, any group of media companies should have invented. It’s an iPad application (soon to be supplemented by an iPhone version), it allows readers to aggregate any sources they want: social medias such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr or any combination of RSS feeds. No need to remember the feed’s often-complicated URL, Flipboard searches it for you and puts the result in a neat eBook-like layout.

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A sense of bewronging

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Doc Searls Weblog - By Doc Searls - Apr. 03 (Opinion) - “Social networks” are getting out of control. And I don’t mean their control. I mean your control and mine. Here’s an image to keep in mind while you read the rest of this post [image]. The calf is you or me. The cow is just one of our many social networks. Here’s how the situation looks from my browser…

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Robot Wars

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

monbiot.com - By George Monbiot - Feb. 27 (Opinion) - Every month more evidence piles up, suggesting that online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren’t what they seem to be. The anonymity of the web gives companies and governments golden opportunities to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns, which create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies. This deception is most likely to occur where the interests of companies or governments come into conflict with the interests of the public. For example, there’s a long history of tobacco companies creating astroturf groups to fight attempts to regulate them. After I last wrote about online astroturfing, in December, I was contacted by a whistleblower. He was part of a commercial team employed to infest internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients, promoting their causes and arguing with anyone who opposed them. Like the other members of the team, he posed as a disinterested member of the public. Or, to be more accurate, as a crowd of disinterested members of the public: he used 70 personas, both to avoid detection and to create the impression that there was widespread support for his pro-corporate arguments. I’ll reveal more about what he told me when I’ve finished the investigation I’m working on.

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Homeland Security's laptop seizures: Interview with Rep. Sanchez

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Jan. 15 (Opinion) - For those who regularly write and read about civil liberties abuses, it's sometimes easy to lose perspective about just how extreme and outrageous certain erosions are. One becomes inured to them, and even severe incursions start to seem ordinary. Such was the case, at least for me, with Homeland Security's practice of detaining American citizens upon their re-entry into the country, and as part of that detention, literally seizing their electronic products -- laptops, cellphones, Blackberries and the like -- copying and storing the data, and keeping that property for months on end, sometimes never returning it. Worse, all of this is done not only without a warrant, probable cause or any oversight, but even without reasonable suspicion that the person is involved in any crime. It's completely standard-less, arbitrary, and unconstrained. There's no law authorizing this power nor any judicial or Congressional body overseeing or regulating what DHS is doing. And the citizens to whom this is done have no recourse -- not even to have their property returned to them.

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WikiLeaks Puts Corporations on Red Alert. First Responders: The Lawyers

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

BNET - By Nell Minow - Dec. 03 (Opinion) - There may be celebrations in some corner offices as executives watch Julian Assange and his supporters struggle to keep WikiLeaks online and its founder out of custody. But companies are plenty scared of the rising threat–not just from Assange–to the secrets they keep. And they’re gearing to fight back. First responders: the lawyers. Bank of America is apparently — and predictably — assembling a SWAT team of legal talent to try to stop the release of a reported 5GB of internal documents from the bank. Its stock may have recovered from the 3.2% dive it took when news first broke of the WikiLeaks assault. But that’s not much comfort.

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The Future of Indian Technology

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

TechCrunch - By Vivek Wadhwa - Nov. 13 (Opinion) - The Indian technology industry got its start running call centers and doing low-level IT work for western firms. Then, in the 2000s, it started taking on higher-level IT tasks, offering management consulting services, and performing sophisticated R&D. Now there is another transition happening, one far more significant: a transition to development of innovative technology products. Instead of providing IT services as the big outsourcing companies do, a new breed of startups is developing high-value products based on intellectual property. The Indian industry group NASSCOM estimates that in 2008, the country’s software product revenues totaled $1.64 billion. It forecasts that this will grow to $11 billion per year by 2015.

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Wall Street Journal Investigation Into MySpace Was Quietly Killed

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Michael Arrington - Oct. 23 (Opinion) - A few days ago the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles about a supposed Facebook privacy breach. We and others noted that the article was complete rubbish. We also noted that the Wall Street Journal’s sister company, MySpace, wasn’t mentioned in the article – either as a disclosure of a conflict of interest or a discussion of whether MySpace was doing the same thing. The WSJ was actually investigating MySpace, says a source close to the company, and were planning on publishing the information the investigation uncovered. MySpace has had three different CEOs in the last two years, as well as a period where they were led by co-presidents. If you count Jon Miller, who runs the whole show, they’ve had four CEOs. Based on MySpace’s overall level of disorganization and constant leadership changes, we’re not surprised that the WSJ investigation landed on their doorstep, and discovered questionable privacy practices. But the story was shelved.

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A Modern Scholar's Ailments: Link Rot and Footnote Flight

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - Oct. 10 (Opinion) - Plenty of Web content is the information equivalent of a bag of potato chips, created to be consumed and forgotten. Not for scholars, though. Authors and journal editors link to Web-based resources in citations meant to last, but the phenomenon of "link rot"—when links, or URL's, stop working—can undermine the usefulness of those references. If a URL leads nowhere, another researcher might not be able to find the source material. In the case of, say, medical studies, a dead link could have deadly consequences, if a health-care provider can't locate information needed for a treatment plan.

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Why Facebook's New Groups Will Change the Way You Use Facebook

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Marshall Kirkpatrick - Oct. 07 (Opinion) - People use Facebook a lot already, but the addition of the new Groups feature today will lead them to use it even more. Facebook's addition of a far more sophisticated Groups feature than was previously available will increase the time users spend on the site, the number of different ways they use Facebook and the importance of the already very important social network in the lives of those who use it. There are three thematic reasons why this is true: the new feature offers an improved signal-to-noise ratio, increased context for communication and a big improvement in user privacy, thanks to respect for the contextual integrity of conversations. The new feature runs some risk of being too complicated, though. Sponsor Signal to Noise The creation of groups in any set of subscriptions, and that's what your Facebook social graph is thanks to the News Feed, is a key way to offer users an option to change the signal to noise ratio of what they are reading moment-by-moment. Users will continue to spend some time in the bulk Live Feed, seeing the most recent updates from everyone they have added as a friend. They will spend some time in the News Feed, seeing general interest updates from the people they have interacted with the most. And now they will spend some time in their Groups pages, where they know what to expect and where there is a social price paid for posting "off topic" content. Focused conversations and collaboration in Groups will differ substantially from the old Facebook experience of undifferentiated broadcast. People will start using Facebook for new things - planning events, for example. It's not just a social network anymore. Now it's also a newsgroup, a planning tool and more. Note that this is very different from the creation of Lists on Twitter. That organizes all statements shared by particular users grouped by a topic, but not necessarily only discussing that topic. The signal to noise ratio will be far superior on Facebook, but the discovery of serendipitous content relevant only because of who it was shared by - that will be better on Twitter, or on the Facebook lists that the company says only 5% of users took the time to create. There are some things that Twitter lists will still be better at doing than Facebook Groups. Context A message posted to Facebook in general has only your friendship as context, and as Mark Zuckerberg said today - there's no clear definition of what it means to be friends with someone on Facebook. In the new Groups, messages will be written and read with several other sources of context in mind: the topic of the group, who invited a user to the group and related content in the form of shared editable documents and group chats. A simple example: people who do work in complicated fields will now be able to post more high-context content to topical Groups than they may have felt comfortable sharing in their bulk News Feed made up of non-specialist friends and family. All the sudden, Facebook is a place to have deep topical conversations, not just lowest-common-denominator bulk public conversations. That's a dramatic shift. Privacy We, and others, have been saying for 18 months that a more contemporary understanding of privacy would lead Facebook not just to respect the public/private wishes of users, but also to make it easy for the contextual integrity of communication to be respected. No photos from Friday night at the bar being shown in Church, and no audio tape of your prayers at Church being played for laughs from your friends at the bar again later. Yet that's what Facebook has pushed people towards - all content being publicly visible and shared with all people, regardless of the context. Until today. Zuckerberg spoke to this concern extensively today. The groups feature, at least in theory, will let you talk with friends about what's relevant to the groups they belong to, and not about the things that aren't relevant to them. That's a good privacy move, but it's also something Zuckerberg rightly says will encourage people to post more content. The new feature does add another layer of complication to the whole Facebook experience. "The groups work sounded promising, if they can offer something that satisfies the same needs as the little mailing lists that people either formally or informally create now," says social network data analyst Pete Warden. "I'm still worried that they're taking the same approach to privacy that Microsoft takes to security. Their space-shuttle control panel approach is like having lots of noisy popups, people are confused and learn to ignore them. Far better if you can have a really simple story. Even with something as simple as open/closed for groups, it's still too much for most people. Look at the whole 'journolist' scandal - participants obviously weren't thinking through the fact that their messages were ending up in hundreds of people's inboxes. Most people don't have developed the 'street-smarts' to navigate even comparatively simple privacy models. I still regularly reply to Twitter DMs on my phone, and forget to add 'd' to the start of the message, sending the reply to my whole world." I'm not so sure. I think people will be able to handle these changes to Facebook. The interface may require a little more work, but it's pretty good so far. I think people will find it useful, as a sub-stream of their bulk News Feed. I think they will find the signal-to-noise, context and privacy gains compelling enough that it will lead people to use Facebook more, and in new ways. Discuss

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