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
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
In fact, over the last few years, Washington has lost its touch in dealing with China. Instead, the U.S. tech community has come to fill the diplomacy vacuum and has made headway on certain economic and cybersecurity issues. The ability of non-state actors to affect foreign policy is certainly not new—it is a trend that […]
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 […]
There are at least three very real scenarios whereby Google—perhaps even without its leaders’ knowledge—could shape or even decide the election next year. Whether or not Google executives see it this way, the employees who constantly adjust the search giant’s algorithms are manipulating people every minute of every day. The adjustments they make increasingly influence […]
That Apple should buy Greece with all the useless cash it has on hand is just a joke that won’t go away. Yet it’s true that, if big American corporations and European politicians had any imagination, they could probably engineer a bailout for the nearly bankrupt country on terms that would benefit everyone. Read Here – Bloomberg
What’s in a name? Place names often change, and those changes stem from a tangle of politics and language. A fun tool from Google, the Ngram Viewer, lets us watch those changes play out across history. The Ngram Viewer charts how often a particular word appears in some five million books digitized as part of the […]
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 more intimate our relationship with the wired world, the greater the possibilities for harnessing data to make life better. And it is hard to argue that these changes will not be disruptive — that is, it will have a profound, widespread, and transformative impact on how we live and work. All told, the estimated […]
The public assertions made by Indian and American officials that no content was taken from India’s internet and telephone networks by U.S.’s National Security Agency (NSA) and that the American surveillance programs just looked at “patterns of communication” as a counter-terrorism measure are far from the truth, if not outright misleading, writes The Hindu. Read […]
looking beyond borders 