Apathy over Internet snooping is a recipe for disaster
As someone who is supposed to know about these things, I'm sometimes asked to give talks about computing to non-technical audiences. The one thing I have learned from doing this is that if you want people to understand technological ideas then you have to ...
Who holds the deeds to gossip bulletin board 2channel?
Massive anonymous bulletin board 2channel has played an important role on the Japanese Web for 15 years (mostly on the dark side). Riddled with gossip and rumors, the site has always kept its ownership vague to avoid legal conflict, but recently a longtime background ...
Criminals may already have made off with $500 million worth of bitcoins since the virtual currency was launched in 2009 — and you can double that if they emptied Mt. Gox's coffers. Internet criminals, security experts say, are attracted to bitcoins because of their stratospheric ...
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Cabinet approved a draft law revision Friday to promote crowdfunding that would enable startups to raise funds more easily via the Internet, financial services minister Taro Aso said. A pillar of the revision to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Law is ...
Tsunami-hit fishermen tap Net to regroup
Kazuki Suzuki, a 32-year-old oyster farmer from Ishinomaki, a city washed off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, has been marketing his produce through his Yahoo! page for about a year now. He is just one of a rising ...
DDoS cyberattacks grow bigger, smarter, more damaging
Crashing websites and overwhelming data centers, a new generation of cyberattacks is costing millions and straining the structure of the Internet. While some attackers are diehard activists, criminal gangs or nations looking for a covert way to hit enemies, others are just teen hackers looking ...
Like other bitcoin evangelists, Ken Shishido is ready to write off the money he lost in the bankruptcy of Tokyo-based virtual currency exchange Mt. Gox as the price of revolutionizing global finance. "In the early days of the automobile, there were traffic accidents because you ...
Pope warns of hazards in browsing 'God's gift'
Pope Francis rightly warns that although the variety of opinions being aired over the Web can be seen as helpful, it also enables people to barricade themselves behind sources of information that only confirm their own ideas.
Computers 'to top humans by 2029'
Computers will be cleverer than humans by 2029, according to Ray Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering. The entrepreneur and futurist has predicted that in 15 years, computers will be more intelligent than we are and will be able to understand what we say, learn from ...
Nagoya first city to get own Net domain name
Japan has just received its first geographical top-level Internet domain, ".nagoya," named after the nation's third-largest metropolitan area, according to GMO Registry Inc. People can now start registering in advance for Internet addresses with the ".nagoya" domain, the Tokyo-based domain manager said Thursday. Nagoya is the ...
'Kantai Collection': Social game of warships sets course for big money
Casual online games based on military themes and with a kawaii (cute) twist are currently a surprise hit in Japan. Is this related to the recent rightward tilt in national politics, or just part of Japan's creative desire to "cutify" everything. It's no secret that ...
Web pioneers try to transform TV
Netflix had a chance of breaking the Internet over the weekend in America. The hugely popular movie streaming company released the second season of the award-winning drama "House of Cards" on Friday, just as winter storms turned large swaths of America into a nation of ...
