The Academy Awards were on TV last night, and the many retrospective montages showing 80 years of film made me want to write something about why few of those movies are available legally online today. Remember all those promises back in the late 1990s about how the Internet would soon allow people to watch […]

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One of Intel’s anthropologists, Genevieve Bell, gave the keynote speech at the Australasian Computer Science Conference last year. After the conference, she was asked if it would be fair to characterize her job as reminding American technology experts that all Internet users aren’t Americans. Her frank reply:
“[T]hat’s certainly one way of thinking about […]

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Some Chinese bloggers are questioning whether a lunar photo taken by a Chinese satellite is real. The doubters claim that the photo was copied from an old NASA shot. The Chinese government has been quick to rebut the claims, pointing out moon craters that appear only in the Chinese photo and arguing they […]

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Online social networks have their own cultures. Erica Naone of MIT Technology Review (TR) writes that social networking sites’ growth outside the U.S. has exploded recently, but different regions have adopted different sites as their favorites. I find it interesting how each site has developed and grown in its own way. The […]

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The State Department will be implanting RFID tags in all U.S. passports issued starting October 2006. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are basically tiny transmitters that broadcast stored information; in this case, that information will include lots of personal details about the passport holder. Despite the security measures being taken — a mild […]

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