As the American mid-term elections begin today with a rather bleak prediction about Barack Obama’s future, the President of the USA and his team must have begun their preparations for their three-day visit to India that begins Saturday (November 6). Although India will roll out the customary red carpet, and there would be visible cordiality and warmth extended to Obama that the diplomatic niceties demand,...

In light of yesterday’s news that explosives-laden toner cartridges bound for a Chicago synagogue had “all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda,” here’s one more on the exaggerated cyber war threat from Hersh’s New Yorker piece: There is surprising unanimity among cyber-security experts on one issue: that the immediate cyber threat does not come from traditional terrorist groups like Al Qaeda,...

For all the talk of a cyber-war threat, it turns out, Attacks on Pentagon Networks Dropped this year: In the first six months of 2010, there were about 30,000 such incidents, according to statistics compiled by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Last year, there were more than 71,000. “If the rate of malicious activity from the first half of this year continues through the end of the...

Is all that worry about cyber-attacks stirred up by strategically placed stories? Susan Crawford sees a trail of data points worth following. I’ll quote here only her first, second and last: 1. Cyberattack – there appears to be a deep interest in the ability to declare war online, as evidenced by cybersecurity research and public speeches by Herbert Lin, a key player who has worked on several cybersecurity...

A few weeks ago everyone was in a tizzy over Google’s announcement that they had made some cars that could drive themselves. With the caveat that I have a growing chip on my shoulder about corporations copying academic work and getting lots of good press for “inventing” stuff a good 5-10 years after government funded grants and awards (in this case primarily DARPA) have already done so I found,...

Bull has enjoyed a central place in mythology cutting across many civilizations. In agrarian India it enjoyed a special place but is now in decline owing to widespread artificial insemination of cows. The photo above of a bull in an Indian town is symbolic of the waning power and majesty of the bull. I am reminded of the following poem… “I am monarch of all I survey; My right there is none to dispute;… I...

Seymour Hersh wonders, should we be worried about a cyber war? The short answer, NO! The amount of cyber-jargon we’ve got in government is stupefying: A Cyber Czar rules Cyber Command assessing the cyber threat to our cyber security; we need cyber weapons to defend against a cyber attack, protect against cyber-pillaging and wage cyber war; we must develop cyber capabilities able to withstand sustained...

Google Now Accounts for 6.4% of Internet Traffic: Netflix Accounts For 20% Of Peak U.S. Internet Bandwidth (subscriptions jump in third quarter): Internet traffic has grown 62 percent in 2010 (it was up 74 percent in 2009):

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, said the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been “pursued across three continents” by Western intelligence services. Ellsberg compared the Obama administration’s threat to prosecute Mr. Assange to his own treatment under President Richard M. Nixon, reports The New York Times. (Julian Paul Assange, born 1971, is an Australian internet activist best known...

If you’ve read either Ron Beasley or my ramblings you’ll know that we think that the problems that society faces are structural in nature and only going to get worse due to peak resources, demographics, deflation, etc. In light of this belief I am growing increasingly involved in ground up movements to address these issues at their foundation, which is working towards moving back to local structures...

While the Right kicks NPR and the rest of us tend to think of it as defined by Morning Edition and All Things Considered and Fresh Air, Bill McKibben (writing before Juan) takes a look at the rest of NPR in The New York Review of Books: The most important name in that other world is Ira Glass, the inventor of the show This American Life. He learned his craft at the big NPR news shows and slowly developed a powerful...

John Batelle has a fascinating post exploring how our identities are presented on the web. He begins by noting the emergence of two distinct territories across the web landscape: The Dependent Web is dominated by companies [Facebook, Google, and increasingly Twitter] that deliver services, content and advertising based on who that service believes you to be: What you see on these sites “depends”...

First there was Wide Open*. Then there was Red Blue America. Now, there’s Matter of Opinion. From its About Us page: Matter Of Opinion (MOO) is a new bi-partisan concept designed to draw as many people as possible into the political discussion. MOO launches weekly survey-based conversations that explore a variety of politically-charged local, national and global issues…issues that (until now) are...

This year we’ve seen the end of the browser and the death of the web, and the end of the mouse, possibly even the death of the desktop tower. With the introduction of the new MacBook Air we’re seeing the death of the disk. No, not yet the hard drive (though the Air doesn’t have one; it uses flash memory instead). The optical drive. MG Siegler: When you get your MacBook Air and you open the...

Commenting on a political issue recently, a TMV reader said, “Kind of like taking a vacation in the eye of a hurricane.” It so happens that my family and I, along with tens of thousands of other tourists, did exactly that five years ago. Today is exactly five years since hurricane Wilma dealt a devastating blow to the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, in particular striking the resort of Cancún with its full...

LATER: Exactly as expected. Maybe the most noteworthy element… Facetime for the Mac. How so? Apple has flipped the playbook putting mobile tech in PCs…… Let’s start with the facts. Apple announced last week a special “Back to the Mac” media event for today at 1 PM ET at their Cupertino headquarters. In it they promised “a sneak peek of the next major version of Mac...

The company is making tech news today for a $20 million round of venture funding from Sequoia Capital. Evernote has earned 5 million users worldwide in less than two and a half years (up from 4 million mid-August 2010). They still have over $9 million raised last year, and promise: We’ll build more features, fix more bugs, add more devices, expand into more countries, and make Evernote indispensable to more...

A family launches a space balloon…it goes all the way up there…they get it back. And there is this INCREDIBLE FOOTAGE.

The man who found order in the chaos of the universe, Benoit Mandelbrot, has died. Mandelbrot, who had joint French and US nationality, developed fractals as a mathematical way of understanding the infinite complexity of nature. The concept has been used to measure coastlines, clouds and other natural phenomena and had far-reaching effects in physics, biology and astronomy. ……. His seminal works,...

Jacob Weisberg may not believe that (I do) but he calls Thiel out on this: The Thiel Fellowship will pay would-be entrepreneurs under 20 $100,000 in cash to drop out of school. In announcing the program, Thiel made clear his contempt for American universities which, like governments, he believes, cost more than they’re worth and hinder what really matters in life, namely starting tech companies. His scholarships...