December 16, 2009
December 14, 2009
US and Russia begin cyberwar limitation talks
The US and Russia have begun talks on limiting the the military use of cyberspace.
Entry into the cyber arms reduction talks - convened by a United Nations arms control committee - represents a significant shift for the US, which has resisted entering such talks for years, the New York Times reports. The change of tack came after the US decided that the cyberwarfare capabilities were spreading across the globe to countries such as North Korea and China.
December 11, 2009
Google, Facebook, and our privacy: We're all in denial
What does it mean to have a "right to privacy?" We have a right to vote, and too few of us use it. I heard it explained to me once, a human right is like a vegetable garden. You have to nurture it, take care of it, and harvest it. Otherwise you have a plot of dirt.
The Internet is not like a vegetable garden. Perhaps that test is appropriate, then, for lawmakers worldwide considering whether the "right to Internet access" follows from the right to free speech -- there are places in the world where is this actively being considered. If a person is denied access to the Internet, the argument goes, her free speech rights are being violated, or at least abridged.
By that same logic, the extent to which one makes use of the Internet, must therefore abridge that person's own right to privacy. At least, by that same logic.
December 10, 2009
New Russian missile may be behind Norwegian lights
Russia's defense ministry said a Bulava missile was launched Wednesday by a nuclear submarine submerged in the White Sea and its third stage suffered an unspecified failure.
Photographs and amateur video footage of the bluish-white in the Norwegian skies have been circulating on the Internet since Wednesday and spawning speculation of UFOs. The ministry did not confirm the lights were the result of the failed launch but military analysts said they clearly came from the Bulava explosion.
AP
December 1, 2009
November 30, 2009
November 25, 2009
Google apologizes for results of 'Michelle Obama' image search
On Wednesday morning, the racially offensive image appeared to have been removed from any Google Image searches for "Michelle Obama."
Congress may probe faked global warming data
The emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK - which claims to be the repository for the most comprehensive set of climate data on the planet - contain what many observers see as clear evidence that scientists have been altering that data to fit in with their man-made global warming beliefs.
Earlier this week, Oklahoma senator James Inhofe said on his website that the UEA emails suggest researchers 'cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not.' Other senators are also considering whether an investigation is warranted.TG Daily
November 19, 2009
Why the future doesn't need us
The new Pandora's boxes of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are almost open, yet we seem hardly to have noticed. Ideas can't be put back in a box; unlike uranium or plutonium, they don't need to be mined and refined, and they can be freely copied. Once they are out, they are out. Churchill remarked, in a famous left-handed compliment, that the American people and their leaders "invariably do the right thing, after they have examined every other alternative." In this case, however, we must act more presciently, as to do the right thing only at last may be to lose the chance to do it at all.
As Thoreau said, "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us"; and this is what we must fight, in our time. The question is, indeed, Which is to be master? Will we survive our technologies?
