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Noteworthy Information

[Simple] 1.4 Million Cubans Bypass Censorship Using Psiphon

Psiphon Inc's freely available internet censorship circumvention tool has helped nearly 1.4 million Cubans this week gain access to websites, the company said on Friday, after Cuba's government curbed access to popular social media and messaging platforms...

The censorship-circumvention tool — which combines VPN, SSH, and HTTP Proxy tools — has also been used in Iran, China, Belarus, Myanmar, according to recent news reports. Bloomberg notes that the Toronto-based nonprofit Psiphon "has received funding from the Open Technology Fund, a U.S. government nonprofit that aims to support global internet freedom technologies.

Business & Government Intermediate read

What Ever Happend to IBM's Watson?

After Watson triumphed on the gameshow Jeopardy in 2011, its star scientist had to convince IBM that it wasn't a magic answer box, and "explained that Watson was engineered to identify word patterns and predict correct answers for the trivia game." The New York Times looks at what's happened in the decade since.

Watson has not remade any industries. And it hasn't lifted IBM's fortunes. The company trails rivals that emerged as the leaders in cloud computing and A.I. — Amazon, Microsoft and Google. While the shares of those three have multiplied in value many times, IBM's stock price is down more than 10 percent since Watson's "Jeopardy!" triumph in 2011. The company's missteps with Watson began with its early emphasis on big and difficult initiatives intended to generate both acclaim and sizable revenue for the company, according to many of the more than a dozen current and former IBM managers and scientists interviewed for this article.

Individuals Intermediate read

Investigation Reveals Widespread Cellphone Surveillance of the Innocent

Cellphones "can be transformed into surveillance devices," writes the Guardian, reporting startling new details about which innocent people are still being surveilled.

The investigators say that potential targets included nearly 200 journalists around the world evidence was found that the Pegasus software had been installed on the phone of the fiancée of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. NSO denies this to the Washington Post. But they also insist that they're simply licensing their software to clients, and their company "has no insight" into those clients' specific intelligence activities.

Developers Advanced read

Socializing Data Value

Interesting report on data stewardship, tells me that stewardship concepts should be part of a (not just technology-focused) data literacy approach.

[Simple] The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

In discussing the notorious Excel incident last year when the UK lost track of 16,000 Covid cases due to a .xls row limit, Tim Harford presents a history of the spreadsheet, dating all the way back to Francesco di Marco Datini and double-entry bookkeeping in 1396. A delightful piece of writing.


Questions Asked

[Intermediate] Open NGI Calls: Ontochain and Trublo

ONTOCHAIN 2nd open call is open!
ONTOCHAIN is a project funded by the European Commission to empower internet innovators to develop blockchain-based knowledge management solutions that form part of its novel protocol suite and software ecosystem.

Apply to Trublo Open Call #2
We are looking for the most innovative research projects which aim to develop new software, platforms or tools for distributed trust. The TRUBLO Programme invites academics and R&D research teams, startups and SMEs to develop blockchain based solutions and applications ensuring the exchange of trustworthy and reliable content on social networks and media.


Tools

toyDB

toyDB is a “distributed SQL database in Rust, written as a learning project”, with its own implementations of SQL, raft, ACID transactions, B+trees and more. toyDB author Erik Grinaker has assembled a detailed set of references that he used to learn how to build a database.

Everyday Experiments

Ikea has launched a new initiative. "EE": Everyday Experiment is a project by SPACE10 & IKEA

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