The digital humanities is the most exciting field you haven’t heard of—unless you happen to work on a college or university campus. For everyone else, I’ll risk censure and offer the pithiest definition I can muster: digital humanities is an interdisciplinary field in which scholars and educators bring computational tools and methods to humanistic inquiry. (For a more thorough definition, I recommend curious readers visit […]
When it comes to web browsers, Chrome is on top, Safari is second, and once-dominant IE is now far back in third. For over a decade, Internet Explorer (IE), thanks to Microsoft’s illegal crushing of Netscape, ruled the web browser field. Competitors, such as Mozilla Firefox, made runs at IE, but they barely dented IE’s lead. Then came Google Chrome in 2008, and in short order, IE […]
Yubico announced its plans to support Microsoft’s Windows Hello platform back in September at the Ignite conference, with the goal of bringing strong, hardware-based authentication to Windows 10. Finally, after nearly two months of waiting, the YubiKey for Windows Hello app has landed in the Windows Store. It’s a strong solution for retrofitting the additional protection of Windows Hello on systems that don’t have support for facial […]
In the summer of 2015, I left Washington, D.C. and moved to Carrboro, population 19,582, in the middle of North Carolina. I had never lived in the South before, or in a small town. Most of my life had been spent along the Acela corridor, in Philadelphia and New York and Boston and Hartford, Connecticut. I thought we would stay a year, maybe two. This summer, we […]
Short takes and quick hits for the week of November 11-17, 2016. ‘Yahoo is not safe to use,’ former company engineer says Posted December 16, 2016 14:10 PST An absolutely brutal article in The Parallax by Seth Rosenblatt. After a second data breach involving as many as a billion users, what should users do? Let’s just say there aren’t many advocates for the company right now. Here’s […]
Owners of some of the latest Android flagship devices and a number of handsets will now be able to unlock their bootloaders thanks to the efforts of the TeamWin Recovery Project. North American variants of the ZTE Axon 7 and the OnePlus 3T as well as the Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime, LeEco Le 2, BQ Aquaris U Plus, Aquaris U Lite and Aquaris U already have their […]
Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto Neural networks, machine-learning systems, predictive analytics, speech recognition, natural-language understanding and other components of what’s broadly defined as ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) are currently undergoing a boom: research is progressing apace, media attention is at an all-time high, and organisations are increasingly implementing AI solutions in pursuit of automation-driven efficiencies. The first thing to establish is what we’re not talking about, which is human-level AI […]
By Lauren Hirsch and Liana B. Baker Snapchat has filed for an initial public offering, sources familiar with the situation said on Tuesday, which puts the messaging app a step closer to the biggest U.S. stock market debut since 2014. The Venice, California-based company could go public as soon as March and be valued at $20 billion to $25 billion, making it the largest IPO since Chinese […]
By Paul Sandle | LONDON LONDON Google delivered a vote of confidence in London’s future as a technological hub after the Brexit vote on Tuesday by announcing plans for a new building in the King’s Cross area of the city that will house thousands of extra engineers. Google’s Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said computer science had a great future in Britain, citing the talent pool, educational institutions, […]
MARRAKECH // The UAE is investing in “rain-enhancement” as lack of water could become a matter of national and environmental security, meteorologists have told the Conference of Parties 22. Scientists have been looking at techniques such as cloud-seeding and the first annual grant of US$5 million has been awarded to researchers seeking solutions. “Rain enhancement is a possible solution to water security, which is in turn related […]
Alphabet’s Google announced the formation of an artificial intelligence group for Google Cloud, the tech company’s latest gambit to increase its market share in the lucrative cloud computing business. Diane Greene, who leads Google’s cloud business, announced the team at an event at the company’s facilities in San Francisco. The group will be led by Fei-Fei Li, an artificial intelligence professor at Stanford University, and researcher Jia […]
BERLIN — A German organization that calls itself the True Religion and that is known for distributing German-language copies of the Quran was outlawed on Tuesday, after the authorities accused it of recruiting jihadists to fight in Iraq and Syria. Thomas de Maizière, the German interior minister, said the government had banned the True Religion organization, which is also known as Read (as in the instruction to […]
CAIRO — One of Egypt’s highest courts overturned a death sentence imposed on Mohamed Morsi, who was the country’s first democratically elected president and was ousted in 2013 by the military. Mr. Morsi, who is serving a life sentence in prison for offenses related to espionage and inciting violence, is likely to remain in prison indefinitely. The annulment of his death sentence — as well as the […]
SHARJAH // Residents are unhappy with a decision to end free afternoon parking in the city. Sharjah City Council members last week agreed to end free parking between 1pm and 5pm in an attempt to curb abuse from motorists taking advantage of it, especially near marketplaces. For Naser Hamdan, the free parking gave him a chance to rest at home after work before he is forced to […]
By Julia Love and Kristina Cooke | SAN FRANCISCO SAN FRANCISCO Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Monday it is working on a policy change to prevent websites that misrepresent content from using its AdSense advertising network, a move aimed at halting the spread of “fake news” and other types of misinformation on the internet. The shift comes as Google, Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc face a backlash […]
Apple Inc (AAPL.O) is considering expanding into wearable glass headsets and has talked about the project with potential suppliers, Bloomberg reported citing people familiar with the matter. The wearable headset would show images, along with other information and may use augmented reality, according to the report. Chief Executive Tim Cook, who has been struggling with a slowdown in iPhone sales in recent quarters, said earlier this year […]
By Hugh Bronstein | BUENOS AIRES BUENOS AIRES Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president raises concern that Washington may increase the intrusiveness of domestic intelligence gathering, former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden said on Monday, warning that democratic checks and balances were losing ground to authoritarianism. Snowden lives in Moscow under an asylum deal after he leaked classified information in 2013 that triggered an international furore […]
MARRAKECH // When Majid was able to connect the final wire on his solar-powered light, it was hard to tell what lit up the room more – the light or the nine-year-old’s eyes. He was one of 30 children at Centre Fiers and Forts orphanage, located half an hour’s drive from Marrakech, who learnt on Monday how to assemble the lights donated by Beacon of Hope, a […]
DUBAI // Indonesia announced its participation in Expo 2020 Dubai on Monday in a letter from the President Joko Widodo to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai. The letter was delivered to Reem Al Hashimy, Minister of State for International Cooperation by Husin Bagis, the Indonesian ambassador to the UAE. “The ties between the UAE and Indonesia are deep and we hope to […]
DUBAI // A Frenchman playing an oud was arrested for begging after police caught him with Dh27 and 25 fils on a blanket in the Gold Souq this month. The busker, 27, was arrested on November 1 this year at 10.30am at the souq in Naif where he had spread the blanket on the ground. When a translator at Dubai Misdemeanours Court asked him if he had […]
DUBAI // A man caught with more than two kilograms of heroin denies knowing the nature of the substance he was carrying, Dubai Criminal Court heard on Monday. “It’s true I was carrying the substance or the goods but I had no idea it was something illegal, and I was on my way to deliver it to its destination when I was arrested,” said the 42-year-old Pakistani […]
DUBAI // An Indian worker will spend six months in jail after being convicted of stealing Dh10,000 worth of signboards and selling them on for Dh350. Dubai Criminal Court was told that on August 24 this year the defendant, 27, waited until his workplace in Al Muraqqabat was empty before stealing 35 signboards along with some scaffolding and wood. The incident was discovered the next morning by […]
DUBAI // A busker arrested after police saw him playing music for money in the Gold Souk will spend 15 days in jail before being deported. The 27-year-old Frenchman was arrested on November 1 this year at 10.30am at the souk in Naif. He was charged with begging. The Dubai Court of Misdemeanours was told the man spread out a blanket on the floor where people could […]
By Chris Prentice | NEW YORK NEW YORK Facebook Inc chief executive Mark Zuckerberg again rejected the idea that the social network affected the U.S. presidential election, saying late Saturday it is “extremely unlikely” news hoaxes changed the outcome. Ensnared in a string of content controversies in recent months, Facebook has insisted that it is a technology company, not a media firm. But scrutiny of the site […]
