The World’s First Computer Password? It Was Useless Too
Who invented the computer password?
The World’s First Computer Password? It Was Useless Too Read MoreComputing & Technology
Generally covering the broad topics of computing and related technology.
Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era
Here’s the bigger picture of what all this guidance from governments and tech companies alike is recognising: security is increasingly about a composition of controls which when combined, improve the overall security posture of a service. What you’ll see across this post is a collection of recommendations which all help contribute to a more robust solution by virtue of complementing one another.
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The Secret History of the First Microprocessor, the F-14, and Me
This is the story, then, of how another first microprocessor, a secret one, came to be—and of my own entwinement with it. The device was designed by a team at a company called Garrett AiResearch on a subcontract for Grumman, the aircraft manufacturer. It was larger, it was a combination of six chips, and it performed crucial functions for the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its first flight this week.
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The US Government Needs to Invest in Digital Design
Our nation’s failure to invest in information technology has severely limited our Covid response. A federal chief experience officer could change that.
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A New Tool Shows How Google Results Vary Around the World
Google’s claim to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has earned it an aura of objectivity. Its dominance in search, and the disappearance of most competitors, make its lists of links appear still more canonical. An experimental new interface for Google Search aims to remove that mantle of neutrality.
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Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China
“Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China” The New York Times, May 17, 2021 (Updated June 17, 2021) Technology By Jack Nicas, Raymond Zhong and Daisuke Wakabayashi “Apple built the world’s most valuable business on top of …
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Technology can help us feed the world, if we look beyond profit
Technology has completely transformed the global food supply system, yet still hasn’t brought an end to hunger. For that to happen, the choices we need to make are political, not technological.
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Dark Patterns: Past, Present, and Future. The evolution of tricky user interfaces.
Dark patterns are user interfaces that benefit an online service by leading users into making decisions they might not otherwise make. Some dark patterns deceive users while others covertly manipulate or coerce them into choices that are not in their best interests.
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The Vulnerable Can Wait. Vaccinate the Super-Spreaders First
Why, Vespignani wondered, were computer networks still susceptible to viruses even though millions of individual users had antivirus software? The answer, he discovered, was that if you didn’t inoculate the nodes, malicious code could still zip around the internet with relative ease.
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Huawei, 5G, and the Man Who Conquered Noise
A Turkish scientist’s obscure theoretical breakthrough helped the Chinese tech giant gain control of the future. US telecoms never had a chance.
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What cities need now
Smart cities haven’t brought the tangible improvements that many hoped they would. What comes next?
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Measuring Internet Speed: Current Challenges and Future Recommendations
[This article explores] the need to evolve our understanding of the utility of existing Internet speed test tools and consider how these tools may need to be redesigned to present a more representative measure of a user’s Internet experience.
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Silicon Politics
Silicon Valley’s mythology of independence to the contrary, politics and government are absolutely central to its story.
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The Life of a Data Byte
This article also travels in time through various storage media, diving into how data has been stored throughout history. By no means does this include every single storage medium ever manufactured, sold, or distributed. This article is meant to be fun and informative but not encyclopedic. It wraps up with a look at the current and future technologies for storage.
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A Decade of Social Bot Detection
In this work, we briefly survey the first decade of research in social bot detection. Via a longitudinal analysis, we discuss the main trends of research in the fight against bots, the major results that were achieved, and the factors that make this never-ending battle so challenging. Capitalizing on lessons learned from our extensive analysis, we suggest possible innovations that could give us the upper hand against deception and manipulation. Studying a decade of endeavors in social bot detection can also inform strategies for detecting and mitigating the effects of other—more recent—forms of online deception, such as strategic information operations and political trolls.
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Operationalizing AI Ethics Principles
What is the point of company-specific sets of principles if the content is largely the same, as we have seen? If well done, the point is that organizations with their own customized set of AI principles can determine how to weigh competing principles and which intrinsic value to prioritize when core principles (and theories) conflict.
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Navigating in Real-Time Environments
“Navigating in Real-Time Environments” Communications of the ACM, December 2020, Vol. 63 No. 12, Pages 26-28 The profession of IT By Peter J. Denning “Jim Selman has been a professional leadership coach for over 30 years. He frequently encounters executives …
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Power to the People. Reducing datacenter carbon footprints.
The Open Compute Project was started as an effort to allow other companies running datacenters to benefit from the power efficiencies as well. If more organizations run rack-scale architectures in their datacenters, the wasted carbon emissions caused by conventional servers can be lessened.
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Technologies for the Visually Impaired
Artificial intelligence is taking the ability of affordable smartphone apps to empower the blind and visually impaired to the next level.
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The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs
ASIC teams always fight the FPGA concept. ASIC designers ask, “Which functionality do you want?” and are impatient if the answer is, “I don’t know yet.”
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