The next cure for a major disease is as likely to be discovered on a computer as on a laboratory bench–and scientists are enlisting ordinary citizens to volunteer to help crunch the data.
Advances in computer science have enabled medical researchers to test how proteins fold, genes interact and pandemics spread in complex digital simulations of natural environments.
If the H1N1 swine-flu pandemic arrives this fall, one thing that may break under the strain is the Internet. Emergency planners say that school-age children and telecommuting adults could be accessing the network simultaneously, potentially overloading the public Internet’s capacity.
FORTY years ago this month American academics sent the first message over the ARPANET, a military network that was the precursor of today’s internet.
Back in March, I asked people to quit whining about Facebook’s redesign.
Last night’s “Charlie Rose” featured an interview with Ivan Seidenberg, chief executive of Verizon, who talked about communications in Iran, the company’s prospects for carrying Apple’s iPhone and the recent news that Verizon Wireless will carry a Google Android-powered cellphone.
There is something very uplifting about Opera’s vision of a Web that turns every user back into a node on the network, with all the rights and responsibilities that implies (this is the blog post today that explains the idea, and this is an inspirational video.)
Amazon has unveiled a new service called AWS Import/Export that is designed to “accelerate moving large amounts of data” to and from Amazon’s S3 cloud-based storage solution.
No corner of modern American life is untouched by technology. And no technology is more transformative than the Internet. The simple reason for this is that the Internet is, at bottom, a communications network, and communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.
Those who are deeply disturbed about the rise in location-based applications and services and their impacts on personal privacy can breath a small sigh of relief tonight. Google, which recently entered the space with its Latitude location network feature, has agreed to take a stand for user location privacy, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Michael Phelps who? In what is probably the greatest moment in this Olympics, Usain Bolt of Jamaica won gold in the 100m dash in 9.69 seconds, a new world record–and he didn’t even have to try after the first half of the race.
Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff says the U.S. government is working on the equivalent of the “Manhattan Project” to defend federal networks and national-security interests from large-scale cyber attacks. During a keynote presentation at RSA Conference, Chertoff painted a gloomy picture of the government’s readiness for a determined attack on critical communication networks and said the recent creation of a new National Cyber Security Center would be crucial to finding early signs of hacker activity.
Top Web publishers are planning a revolt. Even as more prominent sites experiment with selling remnant inventory through online ad networks, and in some cases ad exchanges, ESPN.com is saying thanks, but no thanks. The site recently cut ties with Specific Media and several other unnamed ad networks, and is taking the bold stand that ad selling that relies heavily on arbitrage and algorithms is not for them.
There is a new casual gaming network in town that’s got some serious cross-platform chops. Don’t be fooled by the cutesy graphics. Today, Mytopia is simultaneously launching across Facebook, Bebo, MySpace (currently pending approval) and its own Web site with eight games (chess, backgammon, sudoku, dominoes, bingo, spades, hearts and video poker). On Monday, it will release the same games across the major Web and desktop widgets: iGoogle Gadgets, Apple Dashboard Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and Windows Vista Toolbar Widgets.
New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s prostitute scandal is all the big news here in New York, but the lesser known tale is how an information system–the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network–played a role in his downfall. On the surface, Spitzer’s downfall is a New York tabloid’s dream. Headlines like “Ho No!” scream on the New York Post. Wall Street is downright gleeful about Spitzer’s downfall. But what really snared Spitzer was a money-laundering investigation that was flagged by SARs (suspicious activity reports) that banks have to file with the Treasury to surface everything from money laundering to terrorist activity.
Just how personal can advertising from the Web giants get? That’s a question you may be wondering after reading my article in Monday’s New York Times and the related blog post. With big Internet companies, which already have a lot of data about users, moving into the ad network business, is every ad you see on the Internet going to reflect what you have been doing and reading about lately. To get one reading of this, I asked four Web giants–AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo–a simple question: Can they show you an advertisement with your name in it?J
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