At first glance, Nadim Kobeissi looks about 14 years old. Yet the baby-faced PhD student is part of a new wave of entrepreneur-activists who are finding new ways to protect our privacy online, to the horror of governments around the world. Born in Lebanon in 1990
Browsing: Alistair Fairweather
Every day, around the world, billions upon billions of slips of paper are printed with legally binding information. The vast majority of these are never even looked at by the people who accept them – most are thrown away immediately. You’ve probably done so already today. I’m talking
What do you think of when you hear the word “nerd”? What was once an insult has become almost affectionate. With their extreme intelligence and social awkwardness, nerds are usually seen as endearing and harmless. This makes what is happening in the gaming industry all the more shocking
Neil Harbisson is an extraordinary person. Though he was born completely colour blind, he found a way to see colour using an electronic eye that is now permanently grafted to his skull. In 2004, he became the first person to be officially recognised by a government as a cyborg — a being that is part man
Have you heard of the world’s fastest growing language? It was born just 20 years ago, and already hundreds of millions (possibly billions) of people use it to communicate every day. You’ve probably used it today without even thinking. I’m talking about Emoji. These expressive little symbols have slowly
The smartphone industry may produce gleaming marvels of modern technology, but it is also ruled by the law of the jungle. Amazon has learned this the hard way. Its Fire Phone range, unveiled to such fanfare in June, has been completely mauled by
Nobody likes to feel like they’re being watched. Societies will tolerate a lot from their governments but few things cause more outrage than the kind of mass surveillance practiced by America’s National Security Agency (NSA) and its cronies. But true to form, the Internet has spontaneously generated
Human beings are fickle creatures. As soon as any trend reaches its peak, its polar opposite is suddenly the next big thing. Technology is particularly prone to these societal mood swings. Take the latest surge in online anonymity, for instance. The last decade of the Web has been dominated
If there’s one group of local companies that doesn’t need help, it’s our telecommunications providers. For decades, this cosy oligopoly has reaped the enormous benefits of rapidly growing new markets, from cellular telephony to data. And yet now they are whining about unfair
If you’d told most people in 1994 that in 2014 there would be a website dedicated to watching other people play videogames, they would have laughed at you. And yet on Friday, Amazon concluded a deal to buy Twitch, an electronic sports broadcaster, for nearly