These days the legal and / or moral discussion of the limits of freedom of expression has long filled the slipstream of the hundreds of thousands of comments that, through Twitter, rejoiced at the death of the bullfighter Victor Barrio , using for this the finest irony, the thickest sarcasm, and a whole range of … Read more
With a knife or a gun, in ancient times, criminals could carry out crimes such as theft. However, these and other criminals were generally only able to rob a certain number of people per day . The victims were few. Would-be criminals, however, have found a way to mass crime on the Internet. Everything, in … Read more
The blinking of the eye lasts exactly 50-70 milliseconds. And in the time it takes us to blink twice, that is, 140 milliseconds, someone on the Internet has spoofed two Facebook accounts . This, in more graphic numbers, means that every day some 600,000 Facebook accounts are violated, as recognized by the Facebook security dislocation … Read more
A certain chapter of the Modern Family series consumes a total amount of electricity that is not the same as, for example, a certain chapter of Game of Thrones . And even between different chapters of the same series, such as The IT Crowd or Sherlock , we can find disparate consumptions . These are … Read more
With the advent of the Internet of Things, we must be prepared to face a totally new type of virus, malware that will not only manipulate our computer but everything that surrounds us . Everything that is equipped with microcontrollers or sensors may be subject to manipulation by others. To the point that a simple … Read more
Maslow’s pyramid informs us of the basic needs of the human being and, as we satisfy the most basic ones, we climb the pyramid to aspire to less basic ones. One of the most basic, for example, is food. The Internet is not in the pyramid: if anything at its peak . However, since we … Read more
Launched last August, China’s quantum communications satellite is officially operational after four months of in-orbit testing. The Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) satellite is the first space test platform for quantum communication . As reported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), testing of the satellite, payloads and space-to-ground links have been completed. Micius … Read more
Collaboration between peers through the internet, which Yochai Benkler defines as production between equals , and which, among other things, has favored the creation of Wikipedia, has various variants depending on the nature of the collaboration. Here are a good handful of examples. Next, the typologies of massive collaboration according to Don Tapscott in his … Read more
The blockchain is a protocol that enables every human being to create trust through intelligent codes. The implications that this will have in our lives will be comparable, it is already said, to the implantation of the personal computer or the Internet. One of the aspects that can change the most thanks to the blockchain, … Read more
"We shape our tools, then they shape us." These words, spoken by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan , are more relevant than ever in the wake of the proliferation of social networks. And it is that, in the same way that the typewriter changed the style of many writers, social networks, and especially the algorithms … Read more
Peer or similar networks, P2P, the coordinated interaction between tens, hundreds or thousands of minds to obtain a greater good, overcoming obsolete paradigms such as savage capitalism or communism, has come to be called stigmergy . ** A 2.0 world whose maximum exponent may be Wikipedia **. And it is in Wikipedia where we find … Read more
Sending nanosatellites into space is so cheap that even universities can already afford it . There are already the first companies that rent nanosatellite services for specific tasks. For the first time in history, satellites are no longer a competition between economic superpowers . Thanks to this, the first voice call has now taken place … Read more
All the messages that you write or receive, the profiles that you like or discard, the "likes" of Facebook, your entries to Instagram, and other personal data, from your studies and interests, to the frequency and hours in which you use the app, in what Tinder has of you , and of each of its … Read more
Thanks to the internet, a new class of credit institution has been born dedicated to peer loans or social loans, such as Zopa , Lending Club and Prosper , which lend money directly to people and projects , eliminating intermediaries and the high fixed costs of large financial institutions . Peer to peer bank Internet-based … Read more
Those responsible for illegal activities on the internet is very diverse and includes from nation states to neighborhood thugs, intelligence services, hackivists, military personnel, industrial spies or computer hackers of all kinds. Some, however, have managed to compromise world security to unsuspected limits. Water treatments The SCADA system allows remote control and supervision of industrial … Read more
For most of human history we could only communicate with the people around us or, at most, those we could reach after a long and arduous journey. Given that most people were born and died within a radius of less than 40 km, that wasn’t much, either, according to a 1989 study by epidemiologist David … Read more
There are political parties or government agencies that use social networks to shape the attitudes of citizens. This includes authoritarian regimes that suppress human rights or stifle dissenting opinions. However, there is a clear trend towards disinformation campaigns: false information is deliberately spread to mislead . Not surprisingly, there are more than 70 countries where … Read more
Although we complain bitterly assuming that children people read little or that they spend hours and hours reading nonsense, gossip and memes on their social networks, the truth is that this has been a constant in history. Even in the days when it was being read the most , most were reading trifles . Since … Read more
More than 700 optical fibers with two earth-satellite links to distribute quantum keys over 4,600 kilometers constitute what is the world’s first quantum communication network . Behind the project, as published in a study in Nature, is a team of Chinese scientists led by Jianwei Pan, Yuao Chen, Chengzhi Peng from the University of Science … Read more
Tweets that contain malicious links are more likely to contain negative emotions, and it is the content of the tweet that increases the likelihood of being liked and shared , as researchers from the University of Cardiff have shown for the first time. The new study has been published in the journal ACM Transactions on … Read more