March 8th, 2010 | by jennifer | published in cloud, cybersecurity, Facebook, Future of the Internet, ubicomp | 3 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 update […]
February 16th, 2010 | by elisabeth | published in censorship, iphone, Web 2.0 platforms | Comments Off on FOI Topics and Links of the Week
AppMakr Transforms App Store Landscape, Enables Anyone To Make Their Own iPhone App. Gagan Biyani raves about AppMakr, a product that allows anyone to make a simple RSS-based iPhone app for $199. The company will even submit the app to the App Store. (So, for instance, Biyani put together an app that aggregates all of […]
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 […]
January 27th, 2010 | by elisabeth | published in censorship, Future of the Internet, Generativity, 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 for future […]
January 17th, 2010 | by elisabeth | published in ubicomp | 7 Comments
In talks about ubicomp, JZ gives an example of a worst-case scenario involving ubicomp platforms. He imagines that the Iranian government could use Amazon Mechanical Turk to identify dissidents, simply by posting pictures of protestors and ID-card pictures of the adults in the country, then asking Turkers to match protestor pictures to ID-card pictures. Voila—and […]
