Your home Internet connection works in one of two ways. One involves using a copper wire, probably your telephone line to send electrical signals from the Internet provider to your home and back. This technology hasn’t changed much since the days of the telegraph
Facebook’s recent apology for its Year in Review feature, which had displayed to a grieving father images of his dead daughter, highlights again the tricky relationship between the social media behemoth and its users’ data. The free service Facebook offers to its
As long as you don’t think about it too hard, today’s entertainment is great. Think just a little and it’s actually amazing — you can watch it in a theatre; on your television set (old-fashioned pay TV or “over the top” on the Internet); and on your computer, tablet and smartphone
It’s a sobering thought that in 10 years, around 65% of the jobs that people will be doing have not even been thought of yet, according to the US department of labour. In some markets like Australia, there are reports that up to half a million existing jobs could be taken over
Looking back, 2014 was not a good year for keeping things safe under digital lock and key. If a score was being kept, it might seem that the cybercriminals are in the lead, despite the valiant efforts — and own goals — from the cybersecurity profession worldwide. Cast your mind back
People of the western world have been making resolutions for the new year for over 4 000 years. The Babylonians, along with the Romans who later developed the idea further, made resolutions in the hope of favourable returns from the gods. In the current day, self-interest has
Additive manufacturing – or 3D printing – is 30 years old this year. Today, it’s found not just in industry but in households, as the price of 3D printers has fallen below US$1 000. Knowing you can print almost anything, not just marks on paper, opens up unlimited opportunities for us to
Fast-growing African-focused tower operator IHS Holding has won another deal to operate towers on behalf of a mobile operator, this time involving 1 100 sites from Bharti Airtel in Zambia and Rwanda. The latest deal expands IHS’s tower footprint in Africa to 21 000. Operators typically sell
For years, the development of full artificial intelligence has been the brass ring of computer science. So many of our machines already “think” for themselves in terms of repetitive duties based on human programming, of course. But when the day comes when computers can actually interpret
It is now a journalistic cliché to remark that George Orwell’s 1984 was prophetic. The novel was so prophetic that its prophecies have become modern-day prosaisms. Reading it now is a tedious experience. Against the omniscient marvels of today’s surveillance state, Big Brother’s fixtures – the watchful
