Internet/Telecom

Txting makes u stupid

Yeah, you knew that already. How else to explain the zombies who text while driving or randomly jaywalking in traffic, AGNWE*? But now there’s a reason: they have a tiny vocabulary. Textisms Or so says says University of Calgary linguistics researcher Joan Lee, who interviewed texters in research for her master’s thesis. Texting is associated [...]

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Bypass the Internet!

I’m sick of hearing about how we need to cave in to repressive governments and throttle back Google, Twitter, Facebook, and other information services and accept Web censorship and limits on free expression. Get the hell off my cloud. “If a full-surveillance world prevents us from speaking, then we need to make another platform where [...]

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Evi trumps Siri for general knowledge

Move over Siri, Evi is the new kid in town. It’s no Watson, but Evi, created by True Knowledge, a Cambridge, U.K.-based semantic technology startup, like Siri, can answer questions posed by voice (using Nuance software) in a conversational manner or by typing. But unlike Siri (only available on iPhone 4S), Evi runs on the [...]

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China Telecom to launch telecom services in Europe; U.S. next

China Telecom is reportedly launching mobile services in the U.K., the first time a Chinese telecom operator has launched MVNO services outside China (an MVNO is a mobile operator that sells services directly to its customers but does not own any of the infrastructure), according to China Tech News. The service will target Chinese residents [...]

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Social networks, surveillance, and terrorism

“We are creating systems of comprehensive surveillance in which a billion people are involved and those people’s lives are being lived under a kind of scrutiny which no secret police service is the 20th century could ever have aspired to achieve,” claims militant digital privacy advocate Eben Moglen, Betabeat reports. “And all of that data [...]

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Beyond GPS: your phone in 2015

Attention smartphone users: the recent launch of the first two satellites for Europe’s Galileo global navigation satellite system (GNSS) could make things a lot more interesting in about four years. Galileo will deliver real-time positioning accuracy down to one meter range, compared to 10 meters for GPS, the European Space Agency (ESA) states, and it [...]

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Microsoft offers a glimpse into the future of productivity

Microsoft has posted an awesome new concept video with some ubercool new interfaces that could be here in five to ten years, estimates Kurt DelBene, President, Microsoft Office Division. That sounds a bit conservative. “All of the ideas in the video are based on real technology,” he said. “Some of the capabilities, such as speech [...]

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The Internet, peer-reviewed

It could be one of the most important innovations on the Internet since the browser. Imagine an open-source, crowd-sourced, community-moderated, distributed platform for sentence-level annotation of the Web. In other words, a way to cut through the babble and restore some sanity and trust. That’s the idea behind Hypothes.is. It will work as an overlay on [...]

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How to remotely hack into Wi-Fi networks and cell-phone calls

Ever want to fly a remote-controlled plane over houses, recording cell-phone conversations and text messages at random and hacking into Wi-Fi networks and computers? Well, first, click here and report yourself. Then check out the Defcon session (August 4–7, Las Vegas) by Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins on the latest version of their WASP (Wireless [...]

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Jeopardy!, IBM, and Wolfram|Alpha

About a month before Wolfram|Alpha launched, I was on the phone with a group from IBM, talking about our vision for computable knowledge in Wolfram|Alpha. A few weeks later, the group announced that they were going to use what they had done in natural language processing to try to make a system to compete on Jeopardy! [...]

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