Four of the six battery backups that sacrificed themselves to save our gear. Beep. “Honey.” [Sixty seconds go by.] Beep. “Honey.” [Another sixty seconds go by.] Beep. “Honey, something’s beeping.” And thus began what was supposed to be the end of my evening. Here’s one for your wall of weird. About 12:30am on Thursday, my wife and I finally finished up what had been a long work […]
In this Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2016, file photo, Google Home, right, sits on display near a Pixel phone following a product event, in San Francisco. Voice assistants such as Google Home, Apple’s Siri and Amazon Alexa have always been susceptible to accidental hijack. Burger King’s manipulation of Google Home illustrates the vulnerabilities intrinsic to voice assistants that can be targeted by brands, or worse, hackers. But the […]
ANKARA A Turkish court on Friday rejected an appeal by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia against a government decision to block access to its website, the state-run Anadolu news agency said, a case that has heightened concerns about censorship in Turkey. An Ankara court rejected the appeal from the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, Anadolu said. It quoted the court as saying that while freedom of speech was […]
“All the Rivers,” the new English title of the book, was published last week in the United States by Random House, and Ms. Rabinyan, 44, seemed a little nervous. She wanted Americans to read the book for what she said it is — a story of a specific love and its boundaries — and not because of the free speech controversy here or the backdrop of a […]
China plans to launch its own online encyclopaedia next year, hoping to build a “cultural Great Wall” that can rival Wikipedia as a go-to information source for Chinese Internet users who Beijing fears are being corrupted by foreign influences China plans to launch its own online encyclopaedia next year, hoping to build a “cultural Great Wall” that can rival Wikipedia as a go-to information source for Chinese […]
Outreach to conservatives, increased collaboration between journalists and academics and more data from major social media companies could help fight the tide of fake news, according to a report released Monday by the the Harvard Kennedy School and Northeastern University. The premise of the first recommendation — involving more conservative voices and institutions like the Cato and Koch Institutes — is likely to be the most controversial […]
Two years ago, our “Collaborative Security Approach” proposed a way of tackling Internet security issues based on the fundamental properties of the Internet and the voluntary cooperation and collaboration that’s been prominent throughout the Internet’s history. In this post, let us look at each of the five key Collaborative Security characteristics as they apply to security of the Internet of Things (IoT). Fostering Confidence and Protecting Opportunities. […]
When I visited a dozen news organizations on our Innovation Tour last November, there was a surprising consensus among the biggest players on the next big thing they had in focus: Voice-activated news for devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home. As was true for Virtual Reality/360-degree video a year earlier, the medium is so new that publishers are just beginning to figure out where to start. But […]
By Yesim Dikmen and Mehmet Emin Caliskan | ISTANBUL ISTANBUL Police in Istanbul fired tear gas and rubber bullets to break up a group of May Day demonstrators on Monday, a Reuters witness said, as authorities detained more than 200 people at protests around the city. Protests for May Day, the international workers’ holiday, are an annual occurrence in Turkey and have in the past been characterised […]
The NSA announced Friday that they would stop the controversial program which sweeps up all emails and text messages which an American exchanges with someone overseas that makes reference to a real target of NSA surveillance. By way of background, if Russia’s Putin was an NSA target, and an American received an email from a Russian saying “I hate Putin”, then that American could be surveilled by […]
When newspaper industry executives gather in New Orleans this evening for their annual three-day MediaXchange convention, the crowd will be thinner than at last year’s edition in Washington, D.C. “(That) just reflects industry conditions coming off a difficult end to 2016,” said David Chavern, CEO and president of the News Media Alliance, which organizes the convention. For those who do make it, Chavern promises plenty of practical […]
It also ends opposition hopes that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may ease the crackdown and build greater national consensus after his narrow victory in a recent referendum to expand the power of his office. Continue reading the main story Instead, Mr. Erdogan has accelerated the process. Since the referendum, and before Saturday’s move, the police had detained more than 1,000 workers and suspended a further 9,000 accused […]
This story was originally published on Medium and is being republished here with the permission of its author. Two years ago in Hong Kong, I sat around a conference table with some of the finest journalists to have worked in the Chinese media in the past two decades. Left and right of me were reporters who had broken major stories of corruption, malfeasance and cruelty, and who […]
Authored by Gaius Publius via Down With Tyranny blog, “We don’t want a unified Korean peninsula … We [also] don’t want the North Koreans to cause more trouble than the system can absorb.” —Hillary Clinton, 2013, speech to Goldman Sachs Our policy toward North Korea is not what most people think it is. We don’t want the North Koreans to go away. In fact, we like them […]
Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com, Following the money is always the key and crucial element to determining the “probable cause/modus operandi” regarding to globalist actions. Although there are many who believe that President Trump is the panacea to all our problems, even they may perhaps admit that there are forces other […]
Apple is finally adding transit options to its Maps app for the city of Paris. Starting today, you can use Apple Maps to calculate itineraries using public transportation. You’ll find subway, RER and bus lines, and even Transilien lines. Just like in Google Maps, you can look around the map with a new subway layer or you can calculate an itinerary from A to B. If you […]
Is open source technology a disruptive innovation force in the Clayton Christensen sense of the term — meaning it starts out serving the underserved or unserved, and works its way up to eventually chase the market leaders upstream? Photo: Joe McKendrick It certainly meets that definition, in that it has made powerful solutions available to the smallest and budget-tight players, and, yes, many open source solutions have […]
The conventional wisdom says that the days of the mainframe are numbered, but it just might be that a new generation of apps will breathe new life into it. A state-of-the-mainframe survey by Syncsort shows that the mainframe market as ever is experiencing some shrinkage, but also that there are some grounds for optimism. Syncsort has been working on mainframes since 1968 and has customers in more […]
The Power of Networks: Six Principles that Connect Our Lives • By Christopher G. Brinton and Mung Chiang • Princeton University Press • 310 pages • ISBN: 978-0-691-17071-8 • £27.95 We don’t normally think of our lives this way, but each of us is enmeshed in myriad networks — the real-life one of people, social media like Twitter and Facebook, and technical networks (internet, cellular). According to […]
Only a minority of the world’s pipelines can be cleaned with pigs like this one. Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto Around one-third of the world’s gas pipelines can be inspected using ‘pipeline pigs’. These cylindrical devices have figured in three James Bond movies, in one case being modified to secretly transport a person across borders. Back in the real world, the problem is that the other two-thirds of the […]
The three cases are part of a campaign by Saudi women, who have been broadcasting daring videos with their cellphones, using Facebook to organize street protests and posting Twitter messages to challenge the very idea of male supremacy in their famously patriarchal society. Continue reading the main story The campaign, started by a loose network of activists who have enlisted young, media-savvy women, has gone far beyond […]
In this Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2016, file photo, Google Home, right, sits on display near a Pixel phone following a product event, in San Francisco. Google’s voice-activated assistant can now recognize who’s talking to it on the Google’s Home speaker. An update coming out Thursday, April 20, 2017, will enable Home’s built-in assistant to learn the different voices of up to six people, although they can’t all […]
French telecom company Orange is launching a bank this Summer in France. Orange CEO Stéphane Richard listed some of the features behind Orange Bank this morning at a press conference. And let’s just say that it doesn’t sound as groundbreaking as the company thinks. Just like N26, Revolut and others, you’ll be able to control your payment card directly from your phone. Transactions will show up instantly […]
It was an exposé made for the era of social media—and it’s still having an impact. A year ago this week, reporters at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 100 news organizations around the world released their first stories linked to the Panama Papers—a leaked trove of more than 11 million records from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. The documents and thousands of published stories […]
