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By Alec Wilkinson
$15.61
By William H. Goetzmann
$23.10
$35
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Respect for elders is universal among primates, Mona Lisa had high cholesterol and guess who’s getting rich off those invasive body scanners? All this and more on today’s list.
Posted on Jan 8, 2010
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google.com / phone
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By Peter Z. Scheer — Google is quietly taking over the phone market for reasons that have little to do with its latest “superphone.”
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The dirty little secret of the consumer electronics boom is that a lot of the sexy little gadgets you use every day are made from minerals that help fund what this video says is “the deadliest conflict in the world since the holocaust.”
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Flickr / kimubert
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John and Starry Bush-Rhoads of Reno, Nev., made the biggest little blunder. Their GPS apparently directed the Rhoadses off the road they wanted to be on and into the Oregonian wilderness, where they were stuck for three days. Thanks to a more loyal GPS chip in one of their cell phones, they were eventually rescued.
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apple.com/iphone
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The iPhone is getting outfitted for battle. Raytheon, that clever military contractor, has developed an iPhone application called the One Force Tracker that helps soldiers track each other and their enemies, orient themselves and communicate using an interface similar to Facebook.
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Mark Fellman / WETA courtesy 20th Century Fox
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By Peter Z. Scheer — The film industry has produced no shortage of spectacles over the last hundred years, from “Ben Hur” to “Star Wars.” In terms of technological sorcery and visual wonder, James Cameron’s “Avatar” now ranks chief among them.
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Flickr / Adam Pieniazek
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Thanks to the runaway success of the iPhone, AT&T has the largest wireless network in the country—and the lousiest. Fed-up subscribers, who pay the telco about $30 a month just for data (and another $40 or so for voice), are planning an assault this Friday called Operation Chokehold. (continued)
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The Associated Press reports on one of Congress’ urgent priorities: “Television viewers jarred by abrupt spikes in volume during commercial breaks may someday be able to give their mute buttons a rest.”
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youtube
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What to do when your business and the medium it’s printed on are disintegrating into pulp? Form a consortium, of course. Condé Nast, Hearst, Time, News Corp. and something called Meredith have banded together to crack this nut with a common digital format, shared innovation and maybe even a new gadget or two. (continued)
Posted on Dec 8, 2009
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By Amy Goodman — A battle is raging over the future of books in the digital age that could grant a practical monopoly on recorded human knowledge to global Internet search giant Google.
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Flickr / brewbook
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Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski proposed two rules Monday that would preserve the Internet’s status quo of openness and equality. If the rules are adopted, Internet service providers—including mobile carriers—would be barred from restricting or blocking access to “lawful” content.
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Collage: Flickr / Qfamily and melloveschallah
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Just about every Web site you visit, including this one, keeps track of details such as who you are, where you come from, and what you look at on the site and for how long. But some go even further to please advertisers, who may know what kind of books you read, what you search for, whom your friends are and more. Enter the House of Representatives.
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Wikimedia Commons / Husky
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The online user-generated encyclopedia will require editors to approve changes to articles about living people, an effort to curb misinformation and the sometimes nasty food fights made possible by the site’s pioneering format. The changes are either a direct assault on Wikipedia’s soul or a sign of its growing maturity, depending on whom you ask.
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Flickr / Brian Lane Winfield Moore
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With multiple gadgets and screens constantly running, and perhaps even a different sense of time than our forebears had, it’s no surprise that powering down long enough to curl up with a book is becoming an endangered activity—although, as David L. Ulin argues in the Los Angeles Times, it’s still a very vital contemplative practice to pursue.
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Samsung / Sprint
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Samsung and Sprint are coming out with a new cell phone for the green crowd. The “Reclaim” is made from recycled materials and corn-based plastic and comes in eco-friendly packaging complete with soy-based ink. It’s enough to make one long for the day when all electronics are manufactured sustainably and iPhones grow on trees.
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Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said it, and judging by this three-part series from CNN, the age of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is upon us. It’s warfare by joystick—and the Predator drone is only the beginning.
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Courtesy of Apple
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After losing a prototype iPhone, a Chinese product manager for Apple’s overseas manufacturer killed himself by jumping from his apartment window. Apple doesn’t directly manufacture its products, but the company’s notorious and sometimes belligerent devotion to secrecy isn’t playing well in light of reports that Sun Danyong, 25, was harassed before his death by security personnel from his employer’s parent firm.
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twitter.com/AKGovSarahPalin
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The Alaska governor tells her Twitter followers “elected is replaceable;Ak WILL progress! + side benefit=10 dys til less politically correct twitters fly frm my fingertps outside State site.” Palin indicates in a more recent message that later this month she will launch a personal Twitter account for nonstate business and, presumably, more quotes on the nature of quitting.
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Original: Flickr / nos_inventory
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Google’s inexorable drive toward world domination took a major leap forward Tuesday when the company unveiled plans to build its own operating system. Google says it is designing the long-rumored OS, called Google Chrome OS, “to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the Web in a few seconds.” Wouldn’t that be nice?
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By David Sirota — Today’s technology revolutions have been rightfully celebrated for improving everything from education to medicine to commerce, but we don’t often consider the psychological and societal consequences of always being connected and available.
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By Ellen Goodman — Journalism is famously described as “the first rough draft of history.” But the history of this Iranian moment is a first, rough hailstorm of bits and bytes, tweets and texts. In the tweet of Mousavil388: “One Person=One Broadcaster.”
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Flickr / phauly
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Is China experiencing a pornography epidemic? Beijing’s obsession with porn blocking now rivals its attempts to stifle political dissent. On top of censorship software soon to be packaged with every computer sold in the country, China has told Google to limit its search functionality for fear of accidentally helping Chinese users find the good stuff.
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Keith Allison
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Starting July 1, every computer sold in China will come bundled with software designed to block access to pornographic sites and whatever else parents—and, critics fear, the government—want to keep at bay. As one of the software’s developers explains, “If a father doesn’t want his son to be exposed to content related to basketball or drugs, he can block all Web sites related to those things.”
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Courtesy of Apple
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Apple unveiled a faster, more powerful version of its popular iPhone Monday, but the bigger news is that the company slashed the price of the current model to $99. That makes a robust portable computing experience available to a much bigger crowd, assuming they can handle AT&T’s horrendously overpriced service.
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Mike Keefe, The Denver Post —
Posted on May 31, 2009
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Tired of making machines that beat humans at chess, IBM is prepping a computer competitor for “Jeopardy,” which makes sense since Alex Trebek himself is computer-generated. Japanese researchers, meanwhile, have created walking goo.
Posted on Apr 28, 2009
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By Ellen Goodman — Vermont, Ohio and Utah are among the first states trying to back away from laws that treat a teenager with a cell phone as if he or she were a child pornographer. They know there’s a difference between truly dreadful judgment and a felony.
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The military has been deploying Apple’s iPod Touch and iPhone, loaded with software that aids in translation, intelligence gathering and shooting people. Military iPods will “display aerial video from drones and have teleconferences with intelligence agents halfway across the globe.” We civilians are still waiting for copy and paste.
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thepiratebay.org
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While not to be confused with piracy on the high seas, a Swedish court has ordered that the four founders of The Pirate Bay, the most renowned file-sharing Web site on the Internet, should be jailed for one year after being found guilty of breaking copyright law. All this for a site that provides user-submitted links to media, not storage of the media itself.
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cnet.com
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The notion that men dominate all-things-nerd is a complete myth, according to a new consumer research report that found that single women in North America are all about laptops, video games and digital cameras. So the next time you’re shopping for that special lady, don’t think book, think Kindle.
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thelotusposition.files.wordpress.com
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Can plugging into online social networks via Twitter or Facebook lead to some kind of computer-aided moral decline en masse? A study out of the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute seems to suggest that this may be an imminent side effect of living in information-overloaded societies.
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Flickr / saragoldsmith
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Hollywood has given us many a laptop-wielding hacker who causes explosions, blackouts and mayhem with a few malicious keystrokes, but such scenarios may not be confined to preposterous action flicks anymore. The Wall Street Journal reports that cyberspies from China and Russia have infiltrated the U.S. electrical grid, mapped it and left a little something behind.
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Flickr / freezelight
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The BBC reports on some alarming numbers coming out of Redmond: “More than 97% of all e-mails sent over the net are unwanted, according to a Microsoft security report. The e-mails are dominated by spam adverts for drugs, and general product pitches and often have malicious attachments.”
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By William Pfaff — The globalization of the international economy launched as an accidental policy of the Clinton administration has proved to be a destroyer of people, governments and wealth.
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The FCC has incredible power over the health of our democracy, from how we get our information to the technology we use to freely express ourselves—and the billions of dollars made in between—yet we tend to know little about the people who wield that power. The latest technocrat nominated to take charge of the commission is Julius Genachowski, an old school chum of the president.
Posted on Mar 4, 2009
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For everyone forced by the global economic meltdown to pinch pennies, the Onion has this friendly reminder that consumption isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Warning: This clip has an abundance of salty language.
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windowssecrets.com
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Visitors to CNN’s Web site looking to watch streaming video of the inauguration on Jan. 20 got this message: “For faster, better video, click ‘yes’ here.” Doing so installed a peer-to-peer plug-in that transferred the bandwidth responsibility of streaming the video from CNN to the users, taking over visitors’ computers in the process.
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By Ellen Goodman — It turns out that the woman who recently gave birth to eight babies already had six in vitro kids at home, no spouse, no job and a pending bankruptcy. There’s a word for this achievement of medicine’s reproductive business: nuts.
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A new book by Lawrence Lessig asks what constitutes copyright infringement in the era of “sampling” and point-and-click downloading.
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AP photo / Hatem Moussa
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In this installment of BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen’s diary about the Israeli-Palestinian war, Bowen describes how, thanks in part to technology, the word on Gaza is getting out despite the Israeli ban on foreign journalists.
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Global Graphica / Ivan Corsa
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In a reactionary move against technology and the beasts who wield it, the NYPD has announced it wants to jam cell phone frequencies in case of a terrorist attack, citing Mumbai as an example of how mobile phones allowed attackers in that Indian city to micromanage their assault in real time.
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By Marie Cocco — Peace is not at hand, at least not as Americans define it. Yet peace has been breaking out all over.
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AP photo / Khalil Hamra
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By Chris Hedges — We fool ourselves into believing we are immune to the savagery and chaos of failed states. Take away the rigid social structure, let society continue to break down, and we become, like anyone else, brutes.
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By Eugene Robinson — If things get much more “interesting,” we might have a collective nervous breakdown. But along with the anxiety, there’s also a sense of rare opportunity—a chance to emerge better than we were economically, politically and socially.
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AP photo / Carlos Osorio
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By Titus Levi — There’s no guarantee that a bailout would save the incompetently managed American automobile industry. However, doing nothing may be worse, especially for the state of Michigan.
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Flickr / transplanted mountaineer (altered)
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The president-elect is a notorious gadget hound who has been known to carry multiple cell phones, but he faces a looming downgrade. Because the public has a right to presidential records, Barack Obama will probably give up his precious Blackberry—and quit e-mailing altogether. However, he is likely to be the first president with a laptop on his desk.
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Composite: whitehouse.gov/youtube.com
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President-elect Barack Obama is bringing the fireside chat to the Web, using the technology at his disposal to address Americans online in a new twist on the check-in pioneered by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
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imdb.com
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Here’s a solution to the energy crisis Americans are sure to love: A company called Geoplasma is building a plant in Florida that will vaporize garbage with a plasma torch, turning 1,500 tons of waste into 60 megawatts of the good stuff. It may not be as clean as solar, but hey, America is the Saudi Arabia of trash.
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