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Future of the Internet

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FOI Topics and Links of the Week

March 8th, 2010  |  by Jennifer  |  published in Facebook, Future of the Internet, cloud, cybersecurity, ubicomp  |  2 Comments

A roundup of happenings that bear on the issues in The Future of the Internet –
Canadian Android Carrier Forcing Firmware Update. A Canadian carrier wanted users to download a firmware upgrade that fixed a glitch prohibiting users from dialing 911, so it made the upgrade mandatory. Seems reasonable. But it bundled in an [...]

JZ on the iPad

February 15th, 2010  |  by elisabeth  |  published in Future of the Internet  |  1 Comment

JZ has recently pondered the iPad in a column in the Financial Times. Some excerpts of his thoughts…
First, he begins with a quick history of the subtle but massive shift between the Apple II and the iPhone:
In 1977, a 21-year-old Steve Jobs unveiled something the world had never seen before: a ready-to-program personal computer. [...]

FOI Topics and Links of the Week

January 27th, 2010  |  by elisabeth  |  published in Future of the Internet, Generativity, censorship, iphone, kindle, ubicomp  |  3 Comments

The Extraordinaries Haiti Earthquake Support Center. A followup post on the Extraordinaries’ efforts to use ubiquitous human computing to help find missing people after the Haiti earthquake — a positive vision inspired by JZ’s nightmare scenario of crowdsourced secret police work. Did they succeed? “Yes and no”—but, as they detail, there’s obvious potential [...]

A quick cosmology question

January 16th, 2010  |  by jz  |  published in Future of the Internet  |  12 Comments

The amazing Hubble telescope has now shown us images of galaxies from 13.2 billion years ago.  That’s because the light comes from 13.2 billion light years away, and took (by definition) that much time to get here:
“The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years [...]

Google takes on China

January 12th, 2010  |  by jz  |  published in Future of the Internet, filtering  |  33 Comments

Google announced today that it would cease (well, phase out) censoring the results in google.cn, the Chinese-language version of its famed search engine.  It’s a pretty stunning move, both in its fact and in its execution.  First, the announcement of “A new approach to China” may appear to have buried the lede.  The lion’s share [...]

Malicious Apps in the Android Market

January 11th, 2010  |  by elisabeth  |  published in Future of the Internet  |  2 Comments

As we knew would happen sooner or later, a dangerous malicious app has apparently made its way into Android’s Market. The app is said to “create[] a shell of mobile banking apps” and collect users’ personal information. It’s been removed; no word on how many users, if any, were actually affected.
Offhand, I can’t think [...]

FOI Topics and Links of the Week

December 30th, 2009  |  by elisabeth  |  published in Android, Future of the Internet, cybersecurity, iphone, ubicomp  |  1 Comment

Flurry: App Store Sees Record Breaking Christmas. Great article collecting sales and market share numbers for the App Store and Android Market. Quick summary: App Store grew 51% (!) from November to December, Android Market 22%; App Store has 13x as many downloads as Android Market (apparently not everyone is as concerned about [...]

FOI Topics and Links of the Week

December 23rd, 2009  |  by elisabeth  |  published in Android, Book, Future of the Internet, cybersecurity, iphone  |  2 Comments

As Phones Do More, They Become Targets of Hacking. The NY Times observes that as computing — and especially commerce — moves onto mobile devices, security threats are growing. “It feels a lot like it did in 1999 in desktop security … People are using the mobile Web and downloading applications more than ever [...]

FOI Topics and Links of the Week

December 10th, 2009  |  by elisabeth  |  published in Android, Future of the Internet, cloud, iphone  |  Comments Off

Apple’s Game-Changer, Downloading Now. Long NY Times article on Apple’s App Store and how it’s changed the model of what a smartphone should be. The good parts of the article: interesting data (100K apps for the iPhone, 14K for Android, 500 (!) for PalmOS; $1B a year in iPhone app sales), some valuable [...]

FOI Topics and Links of the Week

November 30th, 2009  |  by elisabeth  |  published in Android, Future of the Internet, cloud, iphone  |  1 Comment

Here’s a roundup of some interesting stories published recently on generativity, tethered devices, and as always, the iPhone.
Generative Irrelevancy. Tim Sturgill considers Google’s video touting Chrome OS. He worries that it may be the “final nail…in the generative coffin,” but he also sees the virtue of moving beyond traditional OSes. See also JZ’s take [...]

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RSS Tweets from Z

  • Who controls the historical record in the digital age? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kpur7yJ7EE
  • This week's roundup of news relating to Future of the Internet topics: http://bit.ly/9qRwjf
  • An amazingly generative 2-player adventure game - http://bit.ly/ayjdZ7 (introductory slideshow)
  • Shame: Edit (not author!) a book review for an academic journal, stand trial for criminal libel in France. http://bit.ly/aKqlWA (PDF)

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