Category: Tech News

• As We May Type

  New outliners and authoring tools are machines for new thoughts.

  In 1984, the personal-computer industry was still small enough to be captured, with reasonable fidelity, in a one-volume publication, the Whole Earth Software Catalog. It told the curious what was up: “On an unlovely flat artifact called a disk may be hidden the concentrated intelligence of thousands of hours of design.” And filed under “Organizing” was one review of particular note, describing a program called ThinkTank, created by a man named Dave Winer.

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• So Far, Smart Watches Are Pretty Dumb

  Smart watches risk becoming just another irritating gadget unless their makers learn to use AI and sensors to take advantage of the fact that they’re worn all day.

  A century ago, banker Henry Graves Jr. and industrialist James Ward Packard embarked on a decades-long competition to acquire the watch with the most “complications”—a term used to denote any feature beyond simple time-telling. Their rivalry culminated in the creation of a gold pocket watch known as the Graves Supercomplication, designed and built by the Swiss watchmaker Patek Philippe. Its 24 complications included sunrise and sunset times in New York City and a chart of the city’s night sky. Graves paid about $15,000 for the watch in 1933 (roughly $270,000 in today’s money); at auction in 1999, it sold for $11 million.

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• Leading Economist Predicts a Bitcoin Backlash

  Economist Simon Johnson says governments will feel the urge to suppress the crypto-currency Bitcoin.

   

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• AOL Cofounder Frets That the U.S. Could Lose Its Entrepreneurial Edge

  AOL cofounder Steve Case makes the case for American entrepreneurs outside of Silicon Valley.

  Entrepreneurs made America the leader of the free world, and only entrepreneurs can keep it there.

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• Microsoft Thinks DRM Can Solve the Privacy Problem

  A leader at Microsoft proposes protecting personal data using technology once used to lock down music files.

  When sharing music online took off in the 1990s, many companies turned to digital rights management (DRM) software as a way to restrict what could be done with MP3s and other music files—only to give up after the approach proved ineffective and widely unpopular. Today Craig Mundie, senior advisor to the CEO at Microsoft, resurrected the idea, proposing that a form of DRM could be used to prevent personal data from being misused.

• Qualcomm to Build Neuro-Inspired Chips

  World’s largest smartphone chipmaker offers to custom-build very efficient neuro-inspired chips for phones, robots, and vision systems.

  The world’s largest smartphone chipmaker, Qualcomm, says it is ready to start helping partners manufacture a radically different kind of a chip—one that mimics the neural structures and processing methods found in the brain.

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• Data Discrimination Means the Poor May Experience a Different Internet

  A Microsoft researcher proposes “big data due process” so citizens can learn how data analytics were used against them.

  Data analytics are being used to implement a subtle form of discrimination, while anonymous data sets can be mined to reveal health data and other private information, a Microsoft researcher warned this morning at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference.

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• NSA’s Own Hardware Backdoors May Still Be a "Problem from Hell"

  Revelations that the NSA has compromised hardware for surveillance highlights the vulnerability of computer systems to such attacks.

  In 2011, General Michael Hayden, who had earlier been director of both the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, described the idea of computer hardware with hidden “backdoors” planted by an enemy as “the problem from hell.” This month, news reports based on leaked documents said that the NSA itself has used that tactic, working with U.S. companies to insert secret backdoors into chips and other hardware to aid its surveillance efforts.

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• Can Oculus Rift Turn Virtual Wonder into Commercial Reality?

  Oculus Rift has heavyweight developer support, and millions of dollars of crowdsourced investment. But many of the old challenges to this new technology remain.

  “This technology is going to revolutionize the way we live, learn, work, and play.”

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• A Smartphone Charger That Sniffs for Malware

  Scanning a smartphone for malware with a charger offers more protection than security apps ever can.

  At the annual Black Hat security conference this summer, researchers demonstrated how it would be possible to add malware to an iPhone by connecting it to a modified charger. Now a mobile security startup is attempting to do the opposite, by selling a charger that can scan your smartphone for malware—and repair it, if necessary—while powering it up.

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• Genetically Modified Bacteria Produce 50 Percent More Fuel

  By changing the way certain organisms process sugar, UCLA researchers have shown how to produce more biofuel.

  Researchers at UCLA have opened a path to cheaper and cleaner biofuels by using genetic engineering to fundamentally change how certain organisms process sugar.

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