Number of words: 376 After more than fifty years of service, the fire horse had lost its job. It was a story about changing technology and its impact on work. Fire horses themselves had previously replaced men in pulling fire engines. Volunteer teams of men and boys had originally pulled these fire engines, but in … Read more
Number of words: 444 In June 2002, Steven Spielberg premiered a new movie he had directed, Minority Report, based on a famous 1956 short story by the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Set in 2054 in a crime-free Washington, DC, the film stars Tom Cruise, who plays the head of Precrime, an elite police … Read more
Number of words: 47 Einstein had said after the Second World War: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Excerpted from pages 209 to 210 of ‘Tools and Weapons’ by Brad Smith and Carol Browne
Number of words: 672 In the 1700s, soon after Ben Franklin created the postal service in the United States, criminals invented mail fraud. In the 1800s, with the telegraph and the telephone, criminals invented wire fraud. In the twentieth century, when technologists invented the internet, it was apparent to anyone who knew history that the … Read more
Number of words: 192 Like the large telecommunications companies today, the private electric utilities in the United States had connected the towns along the major highways but skirted the less populated areas, which were mostly farms. These companies had decided that they couldn’t recoup the cost of extending their lines into far flung swaths of … Read more
Number of words: 372 The GDPR is different from many government regulations. Most of the time, a regulation tells a company what it cannot do. For example, don’t include misleading statements in your advertisements. Or don’t put asbestos in your buildings. The fundamental philosophy of a free market economy encourages business innovation, with regulation putting … Read more
Number of words: 547 The first wireless radio program aired in the United States in November 1920 by Westinghouse, broadcasting William Harding’s victory in the presidential race to succeed Woodrow Wilson. When it first came into people’s homes, it was considered a modern marvel. It connected the world through common experiences, beaming live events, entertainment, … Read more
Number of words: 345 No other modern technology has reshaped our lives quite like the automobile —and in few places more profoundly than in rural America. Until the start of the twentieth century, rural dwellers typically shopped, worked, worshipped, learned, and socialized within the twenty-mile radius that their horse and buggy carried them. The general … Read more
Number of words: 356 Their latest attack was unusually sophisticated from a technical perspective, with new malware code added to the original Zinc software that allowed the infection to worm its way automatically from computer to computer. Once replicated, the code encrypted and locked a computer’s hard disk, then displayed a ransom ware message demanding … Read more
Number of words: 421 On October 30, the Washington Post published a story that set the industry’s hair on fire: “NSA Infiltrates Links to Yahoo, Google Data Centers Worldwide, Snowden Documents Say.” The story was co-authored by Bart Gellman, a journalist I had known and respected since he wrote for the Daily Princeton an at … Read more
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