In life, Alan Turing helped win World War II and sowed the seeds for the modern computer industry. In death, the persecuted British mathematician may provide some lessons about how public opinion reverberates in cyberspace.
Responding to a petition posted on the Web site for Number 10 Downing Street, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown late Thursday apologized for what he characterized as the “appalling” treatment of Turing 55 years earlier by British officials.
by Yukari Iwatani Kane, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
News media in China are reporting that a 25-year-old employee of Foxconn, which manufactures products for Apple there, committed suicide last week after being interrogated about a missing prototype for a new iPhone.
I think I’ll remember last week as the moment when I finally knew, with a certainty approaching fatigue, that the newspaper industry – the business and passion that both shaped and warped me over the past 20 years – had chosen ritual suicide.
Last week, we wrote about the unfortunate situation of the girl in Missouri who committed suicide after some others who knew her created a fake MySpace profile of a boy who befriended her and then turned on her and told her she was mean and he didn’t want to be friends with her. As we noted, there was a push to find or make new laws to punish those who had participated,
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