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

Michio Kaku: Captain Michio and the World of Tomorrow

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Brian Bolduc - Mar. 10 (Opinion) - By 2020, the word "computer" will have vanished from the English language, physicist Michio Kaku predicts. Every 18 months, computer power doubles, he notes, so in eight years, a microchip will cost only a penny. Instead of one chip inside a desktop, we'll have millions of chips in all our possessions: furniture, cars, appliances, clothes. Chips will become so ubiquitous that "we won't say the word 'computer,'" prophesies Mr. Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York. "We'll simply turn things on."

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How will technology influence the news in 2012?

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Dan Gillmor - Dec. 29 (Opinion) - Predicting the next year's news is a fool's errand, but looking at technological trends could give us a hint At the beginning of 2011, aging dictators ruled Egypt and Libya, and despotism was the nearly unquestioned reality in most of the Middle East. The eurozone was seeing trouble at its edges, but wasn't heading toward collapse. News International had successfully covered up most of its rampant bad acts, and Rupert Murdoch was on the verge of even greater control over British media and politics. Anyone who might have predicted how utterly and rapidly those realities would change might have been branded a lunatic. Which is one reason why the annual journalistic ritual of making predictions about the year ahead is a fool's errand. With that in mind, let me offer instead some observations about the technology and media trends we've seen in past months, and how they might play out in 2012. In many cases, the trajectory is deeply worrisome. But I remain an eternal optimist in the face of ...

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Do mobile, the cloud and social spell the end of the PC era?

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Jean-Louis Gassée - Oct. 24 (Opinion) - These are the three interdependent forces that power the biggest wave of growth, change, and destruction I've seen since I have been allowed to take part in the high-tech industry. In the beginning (or mine, anyway), back in 1968 when I was, miraculously, offered a salary to be part of HP France there was the mainframe. IBM – "The Company" – reigned supreme, a dynasty that seemed unassailable. The IBMer wore a suit and tie when approaching the punch card feeder. Big Blue's competitors, the BUNCH, were also called the Seven Dwarves because their combined market share couldn't compare to IBM's dominance.

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NewsTrust on Fact-Checking and the Wisdom of Crowds

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Walter Frick - Aug. 25 (Interview) - Truthsquad is a new pro-am fact-checking service we are developing with the Center for Public Integrity, to help journalists and citizens separate fact from fiction together. We are combining the best practices of crowdsourcing with the knowledge of a large nonprofit newsroom and the reach of major news partners. This unique approach empowers citizens to collaborate with journalists to investigate controversial statements from politicians and newsmakers. Participants are invited to post questionable claims online, research factual evidence supporting or opposing these claims, and verify their accuracy as a community, with professional oversight.

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The iCloud just works ... but in whose favour?

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Douglas Haddow - Jun. 12 (Opinion) - No wonder Apple is keen to push the idea of a post-PC era in which all your stuff goes through its sprawling data complex As with all Apple unveilings, the iCloud was met with a monsoon of hype. Introduced to the public at the tech monolith's developers conference last Monday, it was hailed as a "time warp loophole" , a "tipping point" , and "the end of stuff" . A bit much, considering how humdrum it is when compared to previous product launches. The iCloud is essentially a rebranding and expansion of Apple's MobileMe cloud service, which has ceased accepting new subscriptions and will be discontinued when iCloud goes live. Indeed, there is nothing new here, apart from ambition. Most of us already utilise cloud computing on a daily basis, be it with Google Docs, Flickr or Tumblr. What differentiates the iCloud is how it hints at what's to come. During his keynote, Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, boasted that the iCloud signifies the beginning of the post-PC era, stating: "We are ...

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US Diversity Visa Lottery Programming Problem

Tue, 17 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

IEEE Spectrum - By Robert Charette - May. 17 (Opinion) - Last Friday, the US Department of State announced that the results of the 2012 Diversity Lottery were no longer valid. A computer programming error had skewed the results to those registering for the lottery early, instead of selecting applicants randomly from across the full thirty-day registration period, the State Department stated on its Diversity Lottery web site. The Diversity Lottery is part of the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program...

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Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:25:51 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By James Fallows - Mar. 16 (Opinion) - Consumer-obsessed, sensationalist, and passionate about their work, digital upstarts are undermining the old media—and they may also be pointing the way to a brighter future.

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NewsTrust: one way the internet is reshaping journalism

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Marc Steiner Show - By Marc Steiner, Gin Ferrara, Khalilah Harris, Malaika Aminata, Brionna Hollie - Feb. 16 (Interview) - NewsTrust is an online social network that seeks to help people identify quality journalism. We take a look at how this works by discussing coverage of recent events surrounding the Superblock development in downtown Baltimore, and the movement to save Read's Drug store, site of an early civil rights sit-in, from being demolished.

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2010 in Review: The Year the Internet Went to War

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By David Kravets - Dec. 28 (Editorial) - It was a year without parallel. Threat Level’s bread-and-butter themes of censorship, hacking, security, privacy, copyright and cyberwar were all represented in tug-of-war struggles with unprecedented outcomes. Google defeated China’s censors, but caved to corporate censorship in the United States. The largest computer-crime case ever prosecuted ended in the nation’s longest prison term. A small-time Xbox modder who advertised his services online beat the federal rap. And a mysterious computer virus called Stuxnet finally put proof to decades of warnings that malware will eventually be used to kinetic effect in the real world.

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Julian Assange answers your questions

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

The Guardian - By Julian Assange - Dec. 03 (Interview) - The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, answers readers' questions about the release of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables.

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Information overload, the early years

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Ann Blair - Nov. 28 (Opinion) - Worry about information overload has become one of the drumbeats of our time. The world’s books are being digitized, online magazines and newspapers and academic papers are steadily augmented by an endless stream of blog posts and Twitter feeds.

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Marc Maiffret--the quick rise of a teen hacker (Q&A)

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

CNET News - By Elinor Mills - Apr. 17 (Interview) - As a co-founder of eEye Digital Security, the street-savvy, brash teen quickly became a thorn in the side of software giant Microsoft, finding vulnerabilities in its products, including the hole that the Code Red worm used to wriggle its way onto thousands of servers in 2001. Today, at 29, the boyish-looking Maiffret is still causing trouble--the good kind. He joined anti-malware firm FireEye in mid-December as chief security architect. In a recent interview with CNET, Maiffret talked about growing up fast and how he stays ahead of the game.

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How Apple Has Rethought a Gospel of the Web

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Steven Johnson - Apr. 11 (Opinion) - Who says a closed platform can’t nurture creativity? Apple’s App Store can advance the ideals of innovation — and online democracy, too, Steven Johnson says.

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The iPad Launch: Can Steve Jobs Do It Again?

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Stephen Fry - Apr. 03 (Review) - I am here at Apple's invitation to try out the iPad, and later in my visit I will spend an hour with the company's boss, Steve Jobs — the first time I've ever spent any real time with him. But as I meet with Schiller and Cue, I feel it only fair to reel off the list of negatives the iPad will meet on its release. It falls between two stools — neither small enough to be truly portable nor big enough to be called a proper computer. Everything, I point out, is under Apple's control, as usual. No Adobe Flash capability, no multitasking, no camera. It's just a scaled-up iPhone or iPod Touch.

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How the Tablet Will Change the World

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Steven Levy - Mar. 23 (Opinion) - There was a surprising pitch for the iPad as a lean-forward device, one that runs a revamped version of Apple’s iWork productivity apps. In many ways, Jobs claimed, the iPad would be better than pricier laptops and desktops as a tool for high-end word processing and spreadsheets. If anyone missed the point, Apple’s design guru Jonathan Ive gushed in a promotional video that the iPad wasn’t just a cool new way to gobble up media — it was blazing a path to the future of computing.

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How to End Recession: Agricultural Subsidies for Farmville

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Advertising Age - By Simon Dumenco - Feb. 24 (Opinion) - The Facebook Generation is ready, able and eager to work. How else to explain the 81,125,786 users tilling the fields of their Facebook farms?

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Apple Wouldn’t Risk Its Cool Over a Gimmick, Would It?

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Randall Stross - Nov. 15 (Opinion) - In a patent application, a new way to make consumers acknowledge a pop-up ad. “Some of the best-loved technology on the planet” is how Apple describes its products when recruiting new employees. It’s a fair description. But the love that consumers send Apple’s way could flag if the company puts into place new advertising technology it has developed. In an application filed last year and made public last month by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Apple is seeking a patent for technology that displays advertising on almost anything that has a screen of some kind: computers, phones, televisions, media players, game devices and other consumer electronics. Filing a patent application, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean that the company plans to use the technology. But the application shows, at the least, that Apple has invested in research to develop what it calls an “enforcement routine” that makes people watch ads they may not want to watch.

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Hurrying Into the Next Panic?

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Paul Wilmott - Jul. 29 (Opinion) - On top of an already dangerously influential and morally suspect financial minefield is now being added the unthinking power of the machine.

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Growing Up on Facebook

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Peggy Orenstein - Mar. 14 (Opinion) - Ever since I signed up a couple of months ago, I have felt thrust into a perpetual episode of “This Is Your Life” (complete with commercials). “Friends” from nursery school have resurfaced, as well as high-school teachers…. I have reconnected with the brother of a friend who was killed; rediscovered college chums and colleagues from my early days in New York. I am by turns amused, touched and horrified by these gentle breezes and icy blasts from the past. All of which is possible because I actually have one — a past, that is. As do most people my age, and apparently, we’re digging its excavation: there was an estimated 276 percent increase in Facebook users ages 35-54 during the last six months of 2008, bringing their total to almost seven million. Still, that number is dwarfed by the nearly 25 million users under 25.

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The Benefits of a Network

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Gina Bianchini - Dec. 26 (Comment) - Before Ning started, Marc and I decided that we would judge our success by the diversity of networks on the platform. Today we have more than 600,000 and counting. It seems as if there is one for every hobby, school, language or interest you can think of. I’ve seen networks for everything from raw-food enthusiasts to fans of Britney Spears. I set aside time each day to look at new social networks on Ning, and I’m constantly inspired. Recently at a conference, one of the participants told me that he and his wife were starting a site for parents of terminally ill children. Enabling those types of connections reminds me why we do what we do.

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Q&A: E-voting activist more optimistic about voting systems

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Computerworld - By Todd R. Weiss - Jul. 07 (Interview) - I do think one of the risks of fully electronic voting is that a small mistake can be magnified in scale all over the place because the touch-screen e-voting machines are all the same, they're all electronic, they all require power, and they all use computer code and a particular set of circumstances that could cause something bad to happen everywhere. I don't usually think it's likely to happen, and in this case, it doesn't appear to have happened. But the concerns of security and auditability are not necessarily things that would leave any incriminating evidence of a potential problem.

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Software's Dirty Little Secret

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Larry Greenemeier - Jun. 18 (Interview) - In other disciplines, engineering in particular, there exist treatises on architecture. This is not the current case in software, which has evolved organically over only the past few decades. All software-intensive systems have an architecture, but most of the time it's accidental, not intentional. This has led to the condition of most software programming knowledge being tribal and existing more in the heads of its programmers than in some reference manual or publicly available resource.

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A business model for Twitter: Pay up

Sat, 17 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

CNET News - By Dan Farber - May. 17 (Opinion) - The Web spirit of "build an audience and figure out the business model later" is a great filter. It allows products and services into the wild without barriers or the need to sell advertisers on an unproven concept. Those who can build an audience, such as Twitter and FriendFeed, and before them Google, Facebook, and dozens of others who turned into giants, have the scale to develop monetization schemes that a loyal and fanatic user base won't summarily reject.

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Was Windows XP Microsoft's last good OS?

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Computerworld - By Mike Elgan - Mar. 01 (Editorial) - Everybody's talking today about "Drivergate" -- internal Microsoft e-mails that show senior Microsoft executives personally struggling to use hardware products sporting the "Windows Vista Capable" sticker. The e-mails also show that Microsoft lowered its standard for some hardware compatibility, apparently to help Intel impress Wall Street. This revelation is simply the latest in a long series that add up to one inescapable conclusion: Windows Vista sucks.

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Software is becoming a media business

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Forbes - By Nicholas Carr - Feb. 03 (Comment) - Software is becoming a media business. The Net is not only a universal medium, a distribution channel for words, sounds and images. It is also turning into a universal computer--the machine we use to run software and store data.

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