What Makes a Sex Shop Halal? Responding to apparent pent-up demand for tacky bachelorette parties, the 38-year old Turkish entrepreneur Haluk Murat Demirel has opened the country’s first halal (permissible in Islam) sex shop online. It’s not the first such enterprise in the world — successful predecessors can be found in such varied locales … Read more
Pew: One in three Americans owns a tablet, one in four owns an e-reader, and 43% have one or the other One in three Americans now owns a tablet, or 35 percent of the population aged 16 and older. At the same time, one in four US citizens at least 16-years-old now owns an e-reader. Mixing … Read more
Google’s Quantum Computer in Limbo After Government Shutdown Google just barely dodged a bullet. The NASA team booted up their D-Wave Two just days before the federal government shutdown would have put a complete stop to the project. But with NASA and Ames almost completely shut down, it’s not exactly clear what’s happening with … Read more
EFF Resigns from Global Network Initiative Citing Concerns Over NSA?s Impact on Corporate Members, EFF Leaves Industry Group San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today withdrew from the Global Network Initiative (GNI), citing a fundamental breakdown in confidence that the group’s corporate members are able to speak freely about their own internal privacy … Read more
What is Tor and why does it matter? We all live in public, at least as far as the US National Security Agency is concerned. As Internet users and global citizens become more aware of surveillance activities that the US and other countries are doing on the World Wide Web, there are those who seek to … Read more
London School of Economics: piracy isn’t killing big content; government needs to be skeptical of entertainment industry claims Copyright and Creation, a policy brief from a collection of respected scholars at the rock-ribbed London School of Economics, argues that the evidence shows that piracy isn’t causing any grave harm to the entertainment industry, and that anti-piracy … Read more
Rethinking shoe leather and professional boundaries in reporting ? and academia I was clueless about pretty much everything regarding academia and my field when I entered grad school three years ago (as opposed to merely ?most things? now), and in retrospect, that cluelessness should have worried me more than it did at the time. … Read more
U.S. Government Shutdown: Who to Follow on Twitter UPDATE: Just after 12 a.m. ET on Tuesday, the government shutdown became official, according to government officials and multiple news reports. As Americans consider the ominous specter of a government shutdown, here, below, is a list of Twitter accounts that will keep you informed Ten Questions About Obamacare … Read more
BitTorrent Launches ?NSA-proof? Serverless Messenger App Over the past months the revelations of Edward Snowden have dominated the news. Internet privacy suddenly became a mainstream topic and all the negative news has increased the demand for encrypted and secure communications. How Can Somebody Who Loves Culture Possibly Defend The Copyright Monopoly? One of the most perplexing … Read more
Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before GNU just turned 30 years old. But much has changed since the beginning of the free software movement; now there’s SaaS and more. Malware is common in proprietary software products since users don’t have control over them. Why does this control matter? Because freedom means having … Read more
10 Reasons U.S. Influence Has Fallen in the Middle East By most assessments, U.S. influence in the Middle East has dramatically declined since the Arab uprisings began in January 2011. Critics have blamed this on inept diplomacy by the current administration, but this is only a partial explanation for America‘s loss of … Read more
Turkey bans gay dating website, app Grindr Gay and bisexual male dating website Grindr has been banned by Turkey’s Directorate of Telecommunication Foursquare continues to focus on the little details. Now tells you where the action is on any given day of the week. Someone must have given Foursquare a kick up the … Read more
Is the Cloud ready for mission critical apps? _In the second part of TNW?s enterprise cloud computing series, we look at whether the Cloud is ready for mission critical apps. Internet Archaeologists Reconstruct Lost Web Pages Computer scientists have developed a technique for reconstructing missing web resources from the context in which they appeared, just like archaeologists … Read more
Technical glitch gives Iranians access to Facebook, Twitter, official says Iranians gained direct access to Facebook and Twitter for the first time in four years because of a technical fault In Iran, ?God Has Freed Facebook? For the first time since 2009, millions of Iranians are able to share their status updates on Facebook. … Read more
Is Al Jazeera America Simply CNN, Minus Wolf Blitzer? It’s been just under a month since Al Jazeera America first hit the airwaves, and what a month it’s been — with the Syria story lurching from seemingly imminent U.S. strikes to a looming congressional vote to this weekend’s chemical weapons deal. The fast-churning news cycle … Read more