Amazon’s well-known chinese competitor, alibaba, introduced its marketable cloud, primarily for use within china, in 2009. In the middle of last year it started offering cloud services for commercial use …
Shrewd cities
It is not easy to come up against 500,000 cameras and sensors in all public places; even if one wanted to. If the gift of this giga-panopticon is absolute security …
Collaboration above all…
The announcement itself is undeniably dystopian. Last November, the American DARPA (who else?) announced that it had successfully conducted a live-fire exercise of collaborative robotic weapons—airborne, ground and maritime—without real-time …
The Invisible Campaign
In our territories, these are completely indifferent matters; what are serious are the political buffooneries and the everyday trivialities. In other societies they have begun to understand the seriousness of …
Falling onto the tracks doesn’t stop the train
Washington is trying to brake the global expansion of Chinese-origin 5G communications technology, codenamed Huawei. Right now Huawei is far ahead of every competitor worldwide: not just in research but …
Social responsibility
Who would disagree? If you have a pet and you don’t take care of it, you’re an unworthy “owner”. In distant e-China this is not idle talk. Every dog owner …
Make a wish…
The Japanese “Astro Live Experiences” (ALE) wants to be the first to offer (for a fee) “artificial star showers” – the Perseids or shooting stars, which when they fall naturally …
Public order above all
At the beginning of last December, the Australian parliament passed a law requiring telecommunications companies to provide the security apparatus (police, intelligence services, etc.) with access to encrypted information; in …
Minibrains
A favorite theme of science fiction (the entire The Matrix franchise is based on it) as well as discussions among “philosophers of mind”: what would happen if a brain could …
Step on it!
All right, we’ve grasped the plan: the future belongs to flying cars that will shatter every norm of urban planning, sever all ties with the glorious asphalt boulevards and urgently …
Homo Sapiens in the age of insignificance…
Human: a subspecies of Homo sapiens. It belongs to the genus Homo, of the family Hominidae, of the superfamily Hominoidea, in the order Primates. It is related to apes (especially …
The digitization of begging
What prospect does a beggar have in a society that makes extensive use of digital communication media? It is a question you would never ask yourself; yet it crossed the …