Technology

Mayor Bloomberg has made many efforts to modernize New York City for the quickly progressing technological era. He has been pushing the city to become the next Silicon Valley.

The first step into the era is Mr. Bloomberg’s initiative to revamp and highlight New York City’s website previously stuck in the year 2000. The website was created by Mayor Giuliani before facebook, before the 311 service and before the iPhone. The site was cluttered and not user friendly sporting large blocks of poorly organized text and an inefficient search engine. Now, the design has been streamlined to highlight day-to-day information such as school closings and parking rules. The site also directs you to a yellow box that provides various 311 services all form the comfort of your computer screen. From this website, mayoral announcements can be live-streamed and the bulky search engine has been replaced with Google.

All of these changes have been made in effort to bring the city into a “digital future,” streamlining vital information for New Yorkers. The site can be accessed on various, if not all, devices. It has withstood the heavy traffic caused by Hurricane Sandy and developers will continue to improve and accommodate new forms of social media.

The site has been refreshed.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/nyregion/new-york-citys-internet-site-gets-a-user-friendly-update.html?_r=0

Many cities are receiving large sums of federal grant money in order fund protection programs; however, the city of Oakland, California has redirected their funds into collecting and analyzing “big data” (large amounts of data). This surveillance data ranges from gun-shot detection to license plate retrieval data.

The new program gives the city the ability to monitor everything from social media posts to toll payments. In the past, Oakland has purchased surveillance technology in hopes of decreasing crime rates but have not seen results. The big data project will give Oakland an opportunity to link its gunshot detection, license plate reader and camera data to a central location. The culmination of data will allow them to have better leads.

This is not an isolated incident. It reflects the growing idea that government is using technology is being used to track various aspects of life reflected in the recent NSA telephone scandal. This technology has even found its way to the NYPD and various law enforcement bodies across the United States including police in Texas.

More specifically, the NYPD has used its connected big data system to link everything from license plates to radiation sensors and even to terror suspect lists. Likewise, police in Texas have even purchased a drone with money from homeland security. One same drone initiative existed in Oakland but was quickly shut down due to ethical concerns. The data gathered would not only be crime related but will also compile day-to-day information on law abiding citizens. Many individuals have opposed the use of technology in data gathering, labeling it as, “warrantless surveillance.”

However, this big data system could push the nation towards a more complete intelligence gathering as opposed to the sparse information used to convict criminals now.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/technology/privacy-fears-as-surveillance-grows-in-cities.html

As technological advancements in chemical weaponry have helped protect entire societies, their disposal has also been harmful. Recently, scientist, Young Bae, from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has created an efficient way to dispose of chemical weapons using X-rays.

This weaponry was created with the intent to dispose of Syria’s chemical weapon arsenal. The research obtained funding through the sole intent of creating a portable device that would be able to neutralize chemical weapons. In such a device there are a variety of methods and parts that work together. One such part is retrieving X-rays from dense matter that exists only under extreme conditions similar to those found in stars. This matter’s pressure is used to put atoms together. Fused, the atoms create a Metastable Innershell Molecular State (MIMS). While in MIMS, the atoms begin to revert back to their original state releasing X-rays. In short, the energy created by extreme temperature and pressure conditions fuses atoms which will eventually release X-rays.

This technology would alter the state of warfare as well as safe chemical weapon disposal and for Bae’s work, the OPCW will receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Source: Baruch Ticker

Cloud services like iCloud and Google Drive, has made the exchange of data and information faster and more efficient. Because of cloud technology, there’s no more need to carry external storage devices like USBs or CDs anymore, because now you can just store all your files online and pull them out from anywhere with access to the internet. Cloud services are also much more efficient than many portable storage devices, because you have much more memory space to store your heaps of files.

But like everything in life, this new tool comes with a cost. Although cloud technology makes the sharing and exchange of information easier and more efficient, it also makes it easier for information to be stolen or altered. And the European governments are scared of other international intelligence agencies, like the CIA, snooping around their private data. So in order to prevent that from happening, the European Union are proposing to make the circulation of data using clouds much more complicated and supervised. But that would be pointless, seeing how the very idea of clouds are to make the exchange of information less complicated.

One idea proposed was to make it so that data could not be transferred unless of series of conditions were met first. This is like a cyber-border patrol, where instead of a passport you have these conditions instead. The European Unions are justifying this by saying that they are doing this so their citizens will feel safer using the cloud. Viviane Reding, the European Commission’s justice minister, believes that in making the cloud services in Europe safer, not only would that encourage their citizens to use the cloud more, it may also attract users from around the world if they hear that Europe has the cloud that is the safest. Another idea for the use of European clouds was proposed by Thierry Breton, former French finance minister and chief executive of Atos. He proposed a “Schengen for data” which is similar to the law that allows European citizens to travel freely throughout the continent without the need for a passport.

But some people have problems with the Europeans creating these private clouds limited to their citizens, one problem would be the inability to draw “digital borders”. And that’s because of cloud providers, like Amazon, that have many of their servers physically located in Europe, and if the cloud regulation amendments are passed in Europe, then those centers would be subjugated to European laws. The same applies to the European agencies here in America, which are under American jurisdiction and laws.

There are many people who are against Europe cutting itself off from the rest of the world like this. And they have also compared this action to China’s Great Firewall, which refers to the well known restrictions China has placed on its citizen using the internet. If Europe does end up separating itself from the other countries, its relationship with countries like America will probably slowly deteriorate and with affect them negatively in the years to come.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/business/international/europe-aims-to-regulate-the-cloud.html

Self-Driving Cars for Testing Are Supported by U.S., published on May 30, 2013 in the New York Times, inform the people a new project that Google has worked on in recent years that will change driver’s lives on the road—the autonomous cars. The idea of this new creation is to adjust the car’s direction and to modify its speed depending on the location of the car. According to The Department of transportation, the semi-autonomous cars, if approved and met with appropriate regulation, will improve public safety significantly. In addition, the cars would yield more green spaces, save time and boost mobility for the disabled and the aging. In other projects, some of the best selling cars such as Mercedes-Benz and Ford with radar system will automatically deduce the speed when the vehicle is too close to another car, brake a car of an upcoming collision, and detect when a driver is tired or intoxicated. Vehicles like Toyota Pruises and Lexuses, which Google has invested most of its ideas in, require no human intervention at all.

However, the safety of the autonomous cars still remains a mystery. Mr Calo, a co-founder of Legal Aspects of Autonomous driving center at Stanford, believed that the new vehicles are too premature and need to be fully tested. Likewise, he said that “even if automated were safer, people should worry about human judgment.” In a poll taken by the Auto Alliance, 81% of the people were concerned that computer hackers can potentially take control of the automated vehicles. The uncertainty and doubt have created a huge controversy between Google and government regulation.

The National Highway Traffic Safety, nevertheless, finalized its policy statement and decided that driverless cars are unsafe and require a four-year research study to ensure the reliability of the technology. The agency also suggested special license for autonomous cars and buttons that can be easily controlled by drivers to lower the risks of accidents.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/technology/self-driving-cars-for-testing-are-supported-by-us.html?pagewanted=all

Earlier this year, Spamhaus, a group designed to fight internet spam, accused the company Cyberbunker of spamming. Cyberbunker, a company that provides Web Site services, was put on the spam-fighting group’s blacklist. Cyberbunker is accused of retaliating  using the method of DDoS ( distributed denial of service ).

This denial of service has devastated the cyber community. The number of people that have been affected are in the millions, primarily because the attacks are intended for one group or person, however, many others experience the effect of the attack as well.

The first attack is said to have started on March 19th. After Spamhaus asked CloudFlare for help, attacks began to be directed at the data connection providers of the two companies.

Although this is not the first time Spamhaus has been attacked because of their blacklist, this has been the strongest attack thus far. The accused action of Cyberbunker  is the “largest publicly announced DDos attack in the history of the internet.” Because the recent attacks have been increasingly strong, the Internets core infrastructure has been “exploited.” Internet engineers fear that the attacks will be stronger to the point where people will be denied internet services, such as checking an e-mail.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/technology/internet/online-dispute-becomes-internet-snarling-attack.html?partner=rss&emc=rss