The acronym of the moment in Beijing is BAT: Baidu (the search engine), Alibaba (Jack Ma’s answer to Amazon), and Tencent (which is the nearest thing to Facebook). These companies are much more than clones of their US counterparts; each has shown itself to be innovative in its own right. Read Here – Boston Globe
President Obama has been called the “first social-media president.” It’s both a true and a misleading characterisation. On the one hand, the Obama White House was indeed the first presidency to make use of services like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. But on the other hand, these services either didn’t exist or weren’t used by […]
During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Macedonian teens looking to get paid for ad-clicks, Russian cyber sophisticates apparently looking to tilt the outcome, and some homegrown mood manipulators broadcast outrageous and false stories packaged to look like real news. Their counterfeit posts were nearly indistinguishable from authentic coin and remain so, even in the face […]
Facebook is a departure from 20th century technologies, because it is both a social media and a broadcast platform. It is a modern telephone network and television, a global mail system and a global newspaper. Read Here – The Atlantic
Apple and the FBI are also aware that their domestic fight may have serious international repercussions. The outcome of their dispute will create an important precedent for foreign law enforcement agencies that seek data from Apple and other technology firms such as Facebook and Google. Read Here – Foreign Affairs
Interestingly, Modi is in the US at the same time as Chinese president Xi Jinping and is somewhat eclipsed. The US press, which covered Modi’s first visit last year with a mixture of curiosity and enthusiasm, has largely ignored him so far. But that is the nature of the game. Modi is now a known […]
What does global communication look like? One way to picture it is by mapping phone calls—specifically where they’re coming from and heading to. Read Here – The Atlantic
As anti-government protests escalated in Ukraine in February, activists took to Facebook and Twitter to popularize a name for the revolutionary movement. They called it “Euromaidan,” after the pro-European bent of the demonstrators and the central square in the capital where they were massing. Read Here – The Atlantic
This non-human traffic is search bots, scrapers, hacking tools, and other human impersonators, little pieces of code skittering across the web. You might describe this phenomenon as The Internet of Thingies. Read Here – Quartz
The heart of Facebook’s experiment lies just south of the Arctic Circle, in the Swedish town of Luleå. In the middle of a forest at the edge of town, the company in June opened its latest mega-sized data center, a giant building that comprises thousands of rectangular metal panels and looks like a wayward spaceship. […]
looking beyond borders 