Skyway Recommended May 19th to 26th
This week: Health Benefits of Electric Car; Facebook Privacy; DARPA’s new projects; Secret History of Hypertext; The Most Secure Email in the Universe
The Atlantic | Forget Saving the Planet, Driving an Electric Car Will Save Your Life
The failure to persuade a sizeable percentage of Americans that climate change poses a clear and present danger is one of the great failures in marketing and the subject of considerable debate among scientists, academics and politicians. But there is one argument for taking action against global warming that has resonated: health. Read More…
Bloomberg Businessweek | Facebook Adjusts Its Privacy Controls—Again
For years people have been complaining that Facebook’s (FB) privacy controls are too confusing, and the social network made several changes to these policies on Thursday that indicate it agrees. For new users’ first post, Facebook’s default setting will be to share only with their friends. This makes sense, considering that someone who hasn’t been on Facebook before is less likely to realize what kind of risks he’s taking by posting private thoughts. Read More…
Quartz | One of these defense projects could become bigger than the internet
Forty years ago, a group of researchers with military money set out to test the wacky idea of making computers talk to one another in a new way, using digital information packets that could be traded among multiple machines rather than telephonic, point-to-point circuit relays. The project, called ARPANET, went on to fundamentally change life on Earth under its more common name, the Internet.
Today, the agency that bankrolled the Internet is called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which boasts a rising budget of nearly $3 billion split across 250 programs. They all have national security implications but, like the Internet, much of what DARPA funds can be commercialized, spread and potentially change civiliadefenn life in big ways that its originators didn’t conceive. What’s DARPA working on lately that that could be Internet big? Read More…
The Atlantic | The Secret History of Hypertext
When Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” first appeared in The Atlantic’s pages in July 1945, it set off an intellectual chain reaction that resulted, more than four decades later, in the creation of the World Wide Web. Read More…
Defense One | What the Most Secure Email in the Universe Would Look Like
Say you wanted to send an email more secure than any message that had ever been transmitted in human history, a message with absolutely no chance of being intercepted. How would you do it? Read More…