Sub-Saharan Africa is not famous for technological innovation but a report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology indicates that mobile telephone use has grown twice as quickly there as anywhere else in the world. Even in tiny Rwanda, the government estimates that revenue from mobile phones will reach US$1 billion by 2012.
Africa Confidential: Don’t forget your SIM card (Free preview, haven’t read full article)
(via Appropedia)
Somalia’s mobile phone business is booming despite the almost daily artillery fire that flies over expensive satellite dishes and the violence that has brought misery to the population of the Horn of Africa nation.
The three largest firms, Hormuud Telecom, Nation Link and Telecom Somalia, have a combined 1.8 million mobile users who enjoy some of the world’s cheapest calling rates, allowing them to stay in touch with their loved ones amidst the conflict. […]
With mobile phone use at about 18 percent of the population, Somalia lags its neighbour and east Africa’s largest economy Kenya, where it is above 40 percent, but it is ahead of several other poor African nations.
Reuters: Somali mobile phone firms thrive despite chaos
(via Global Guerillas)
Innocent people have been branded as child abusers after malware infected their PCs, an AP investigation has discovered.
Technically sophisticated abusers sometimes store images of child abuse on PCs infected by Trojans that grant them illicit access to compromised machines.
The plight of those framed in this way is all the worse because paedophiles commonly use supposed malware infections of their PCs to explain the presence of images of child abuse. Because of this the “Trojan did it” defence is understandably met with scepticism from law enforcement professionals.
“It’s an example of the old `dog ate my homework’ excuse,” says Phil Malone, director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society told AP. “The problem is, sometimes the dog does eat your homework.”
Last night I linked to an interview with Rupert Murdoch in which he says that News Corp will probably de-index their sites from Google.
I figured it was all bluster. Search engine traffic is more valuable that Murdoch suggests, and there are probably plenty of people in high places at News Corp who know it.
So here’s what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he’s still having lurid fantasies inspired by the momentary insanity that caused Google to pay him for the exclusive right to index MySpace (thus momentarily rendering MySpace a visionary business-move instead of a ten-minutes-behind-the-curve cash-dump).
So what he’s hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you’ve never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year’s operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google.
Jason Calacanis has suggested this approach as a means to “kill Google.”
But it may actually be neither the death of Google, nor the death of News Corp if they are so foolish as to carry out this plan. It could be the death of the robots exclusion standard. I would guess News Corp would use robots.txt to de-index their sites. But it’s a “purely advisory” protocol that Google is under no obligation to honor. They could continue indexing News Corps if they so choose. So could every other search engine, big or small. And I’d guess they would if big content providers started going exclusive with search engines.
If News Corps puts all its contend behind a pay wall, this point is moot – Google and other search engines won’t be able to index it, and robots.txt will be fine. But it’s something to think about.
(Hat tips to Jay Rosen for the TimesSelect link and Chris Arkenberg for the Jason Calacanis video)
Vint Cerf, Google’s internet evangelist, has unveiled a new protocol intended to power an interplanetary internet.
The Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol emerged from work first started in 1998 in partnership with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The initial goal was to modify the ubiquitous Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to facilitate robust communications between celestial bodies and satellites. […]
The core issue is that TCP assumes a continuous (and fairly reliable) connection. DTN makes no such assumptions, requiring each node to buffer all of its packets until a stable connection can be established. Whereas TCP will repeatedly attempt to send packets until they are successfully acknowledged, DTN will automatically find a destination node with a reliable connection, and then send its payload just once. Given the latency of space communications and the minimal power restrictions placed upon satellites, DTNs approach seems prudent.
However most people don’t have a need for regular satellite communication (well, our columnist Warren Ellis has that death ray of his), but Cerf sees his robust protocol having more down-to-Earth applications. Mobile networks, for example, must regularly cope with long periods of delay or loss – a train tunnel rudely interrupting a YouTube stream, for example. Perhaps looking to gain an edge on its competitors, Google has already integrated DTN into Android’s networking stack.
Wired UK: Google unveils protocol for an interplanetary internet
(via Wade)
The Pirate Bay is going on a road trip through Europe, one they hope to end today in a former NATO bunker. After a move from Sweden to the Ukraine, The Pirate Bay has now arrived at CyberBunker, an ISP that can provide them with a facility that can resist a nuclear attack as well as electromagnetic pulse bombs.
After being chased by various anti-piracy groups, The Pirate Bay returned a few hours ago. “Nobody puts The Pirate Bay in a corner,” they say on their frontpage, referencing Patrick Swayze’s famous line in Dirty Dancing. Not in a corner, no, but what about a bunker?
Torrent Freak: The Pirate Bay Relocates to a Nuclear Bunker
(via Alterati)
A New York-based anarchist has been arrested by the FBI and charged with hindering prosecution after he allegedly used the social networking site Twitter to help protesters at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh evade the police.
Elliot Madison, 41, from Queens, had his home raided and was put on $30,000 (£19,000) bail after he and Michael Wallschlaeger, 46, were tracked to the Carefree Inn motel in Pittsburgh during the summit on 24 and 25 September. […]
The FBI said that as well as the computers and radio scanning equipment discovered at the motel, they also confiscated from Madison’s home 11 gas masks, five pairs of goggles and test tubes and beakers. They said they also took away anarchist books and pictures of Marx and Lenin.
Guardian: New York man accused of using Twitter to direct protesters during G20 summit
Unconscionable.
In the 18 months since the “missing link of electronics” was discovered in Hewlett-Packard’s laboratories in Silicon Valley, California, memristors have spawned a hot new area of physics and raised hope of electronics becoming more like brains. […]
Memristors behave a bit like resistors, which simply resist the flow of electric current. But rather than only respond to present conditions, a memristor can also “remember” the last current it experienced.
That’s an ability that would usually require many different components. “Each memristor can take the place of 7 to 12 transistors,” says Stan Williams, head of HP’s memristor research. What’s more, it can hold its memory without power. By contrast, “transistors require power at all times and so there is a significant power loss through leakage currents”, Williams explains. […]
The similarities between memristive circuits and the behaviour of some simple organisms suggests the hybrid devices could also open the way for “neuromorphic” computing, says Williams, in which computers learn for themselves, like animals.
New Scientist: Electronics ‘missing link’ united with rest of the family
More background: New Scientist: Memristor minds: The future of artificial intelligence
(Via Chris 23)
In October, a small team of Silicon Valley researchers plans to turn software originally designed to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life to the task of looking for evidence of artificial life generated on a cluster of high-performance computers.
The effort, dubbed the EvoGrid, is the brainchild and doctoral dissertation topic of Bruce Damer, a Silicon Valley computer scientist who develops simulation software for NASA at a company, Digital Space, based in Santa Cruz, Calif.
Mr. Damer and his chief engineer, Peter Newman, are modeling their effort after the SETI@Home project, which was started by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program to make use of hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected computers in homes and offices. The project turned these small computers into a vast supercomputer by using pattern recognition software on individual computers to sift through a vast amount of data to look for evidence of faint signals from civilizations elsewhere in the cosmos.
New York Times: Wanted: Home Computers to Join in Research on Artificial Life
(via Chris Arkenberg)
Probably the earliest depiction of a communication device resembling a laptop has been discovered in an ancient Flash Gordon comics by Mende Petreski of Prilep, Macedonia.
Browsing through his comics collection, Mr. Petreski stumbled upon a panel in Politikin Zabavnik weekly published June 14, 1974, featuring the forces of Ming the Merciless using a device which looks a lot like a laptop to talk to their leader.
Science Fiction Observer: First “Laptop” Discovered in Flash Gordon Comics
(via Disinfo)
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