Digital Consequences
The team that ran the most technologically advanced presidential campaign in modern history is finding it difficult to adapt that model to government. WhiteHouse.gov, envisioned as the primary vehicle for President Obama to communicate with the online masses, has been overwhelmed by challenges that staffers did not foresee and technological problems they have yet to solve. Obama, for example, would like to send out mass e-mail updates on presidential initiatives, but the White House does not have the technology in place to do so. The same goes for text messaging, another campaign staple. Beyond the technological upgrades needed to enable text broadcasts, there are security and privacy rules to sort out ...
An Internet security company claims that Iran has taken advantage of a computer security breach to obtain engineering and communications information about Marine One
Google's web-based email service, Gmail, has crashed this morning, leaving millions of users from Britain to Australia unable to send and receive messages.
[Two great lines in this article:] If you ever put any content on the Internet, expect it to stay there. [and] fighting the Internet is as futile as trying to wade into the ocean and control the tides.
In addition to Boxee, Hulu also has pulled its content from the CBS-owned TV.com, sparking a push-back from TV.com, which doesn't want to say good-bye so quickly. Could the moves by Fox and NBC-owned Hulu be the first in a war over digital distribution of television content?
Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code, or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands. The stark warning — which includes discussion of a "Terminator"-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters — is part of a hefty report funded by and prepared for the U.S. Navy's high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research. The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans. Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over Homo sapiens soldiers.
TelTech Systems is offering mobile telephone users the power to unmask callers who block their numbers or names from being displayed. The US-based firm launched a TrapCall service this month with an online posting thanking its development team and declaring "Get ready for the site to go ballistic." To use the service, people register mobile telephone numbers at a TrapCall.com website without having to download software to devices. Calls from unidentified sources can then be bounced to TelTech computers, which reveal points of origin.
French fighter planes were unable to take off after military computers were infected by a computer virus
Zune users, particularly of the 30-GB version, have been waking up to find their music players are part of an apocalyptic meltdown. The Microsoft devices have been freezing after loading up, leaving users with a picture of the Zune icon and a loading bar. The reports seem to have started coming in at around midnight Tuesday and have continued to mount.
Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance. Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. ... A few years ago, Google's apparently unimpeachable objectivity got some people very excited, and technology utopians began to herald Google as the conduit for a new form of democracy. Google was only too pleased to encourage this view. ... what was once Googlewashing by a select few now has Google's active participation.
The country's broadcasters were summoned Friday by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to deal with charges that the live saturation coverage had helped the terrorists. At the same time, however, traditional media were criticized as too slow and inaccurate by legions of "citizen journalists" using Internet services such as Twitter and photo site Flickr. The deputy commissioner of police argued that the terrorists, who were holed up in two major hotels and became involved in floor-by-floor firefights with police, were gaining tactical information from TV. Using powers under Section 19 of the country's Cable Television Networks Act, he ordered a blackout of TV news channels.
By 2010 the US will have invested $4 billion in a research programme into "autonomous systems", the military jargon for robots, on the basis that they would not succumb to fear or the desire for vengeance that afflicts frontline soldiers. A British robotics expert has been recruited by the US Navy to advise them on building robots that do not violate the Geneva Conventions. [Anything that can be programmed can be hacked and re-programmed. And no program can encompass every moral possibility.]
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