John Naughton - The Japan Times

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John Naughton

Japan Times

LIFE / Digital

Jan 9, 2014

A lost year for new technology? Look beyond 2013's gadgets

Writing the other day in Quartz, an admirable sister publication of The Atlantic magazine, the experienced technology watcher Christopher Mims struck a gloomy note. Under the headline "2013 was a lost year for tech," he lamented that "all in, 2013 was an embarrassment for the entire tech industry and...

LIFE / Lifestyle

Jan 2, 2014

Google's drive into robotics should concern us all

Over the past year, Google has bought eight robotics companies. Its most recent acquisition is an outfit called Boston Dynamics, which makes the nearest thing to a mechanical mule that you are ever likely to see. It's called Big Dog and it walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads. It's the size of...

LIFE / Digital

Dec 24, 2013

Even our Facebook 'grunts' could be monetized

As Mark Twain observed: "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." And that was a long time before the Web. Which brings us to a meme that was propagating last week though social media. Its essence was an assertion that Facebook monitored — and stored —...

LIFE / Digital

Dec 17, 2013

Why do governments make such a mess of IT?

This is a tale of two cities — Washington and London — and of the governments that rule from them. What links the pair is the puzzling failure of said governments to manage two vital IT projects. In both cases, the projects are critically important for the political credibility of their respective...

LIFE / Digital

Dec 10, 2013

Startups now have it easy thanks to 'incubators.'

One of my favourite books is John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Great Crash, 1929," which, with John Maynard Keynes' "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," is a great example of how an expert can write elegantly about something that is intrinsically complex. Galbraith wrote the (short) book as a diversion...

LIFE / Digital

Dec 3, 2013

Why the NSA has landed us all in another nice mess

Fans of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy will fondly remember Oliver's complaint to Stanley: "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!" In a future remake, Hardy will be played by Barack Obama, suitably enhanced with a toothbrush moustache, while Keith Alexander, currently head of the U.S. National...

LIFE / Digital

Nov 26, 2013

What's Twitter's real value?

A national economy is an unimaginably complex system. And yet we compress all its complexity into a single measure, and then focus obsessively on that. If you want a metaphor for this, think of King Kong spending most of his time staring at a pinhead, worrying about whether it is moving or not. That...

LIFE / Digital

Nov 19, 2013

Church of Apple tests the faith of its flock

Someone once said that one of the advantages of religion is that it offers security in return for obedience. This point was not lost on the late Steve Jobs, the cofounder, savior and high priest of Apple. And it led Italian semiotician, philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco, in an essay published in the...

Japan Times

LIFE / Digital

Nov 12, 2013

The NSA's war on terror is more than just a 'neat' hacking game

Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. And then there's Edward Snowden, who was a spy and then became something else. Nobody is neutral about him. The other day I heard a senior military officer describe him unambiguously as "a thief." In Washington he seems to be universally regarded as a traitor. Many people...

LIFE / Digital

Nov 5, 2013

Why the Obamacare website was doomed

One of the most dispiriting spectacles of the last month has been the botched launch of HealthCare.gov, the website created to implement President Barack Obama's landmark healthcare reforms. Obamacare had a desperately turbulent passage through Congress and survived various wrecking attempts by the Tea...

LIFE / Digital

Oct 29, 2013

Remember past smells with the Madeleine

Next month sees the 100th anniversary of the publication of "Swann's Way," the first volume of Marcel Proust's masterpiece "Remembrance of Things Past" (or, if you prefer D.J. Enright's translation, "In Search of Lost Time"). So stand by for what one expert calls a Proustathon.

LIFE

Oct 22, 2013

Apathy is the real enemy in NSA affair

One of the most disturbing aspects of the public response to Edward Snowden's revelations about the scale of governmental surveillance is how little public disquiet there appears to be about it. A recent YouGov poll, for example, asked respondents whether the British security services have too many or...

LIFE / Digital

Oct 15, 2013

The back door to your PCs, smartphones that can't close

At a remarkable conference held at the Aspen Institute in 2011, Gen. Michael Hayden, a former head of both the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, said something very interesting. In a discussion of how to secure the "critical infrastructure" of the United States, he described...

LIFE / Digital

Oct 8, 2013

Big data has made privacy obsolete

Watching the legal system deal with the Internet is like watching somebody trying to drive a car by looking only in the rear-view mirror. The results are amusing and predictable but not really interesting. On the other hand, watching the efforts of regulators — whether British ones such as Ofcom, or...

LIFE / Digital

Oct 1, 2013

Apple has a secret weapon in iOS7, iPhone5s

When Steve Jobs was still with us, many commentators — yours truly included — used to complain about the "reality distortion field" that surrounded Apple's charismatic leader. Those in attendance when Jobs launched the devices and services (iPod, iTunes, OS X, iMac, MacBook, iPhone and iPad)...

LIFE / Digital

Sep 24, 2013

Is China after our inventions?

Some things never change. For as long as I can remember, people in the west have been paranoid about the Orient — and about China in particular. I grew up in an ultra-devout Catholic household in rural Ireland and I remember my mother being terrified by what people then called "the yellow peril,"...

LIFE / Digital

Sep 17, 2013

After the Snowden leaks, why trust a U.S. cloud?

"It's an ill bird," runs the adage, "that fouls its own nest." Cue the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), which, we now know, has been busily doing this for quite a while. As the revelations by Edward Snowden tumbled out, the scale of the fouling slowly began to dawn on us.

LIFE / Digital

Sep 10, 2013

Coase idea explains Internet economics

When the news broke last week that Ronald Coase, the economist and Nobel laureate, had died at the age of 102, what came immediately to mind was Keynes' observation that "practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct...

LIFE / Digital

Sep 3, 2013

Web giants pumping us for data

Should you be looking for an example of hucksterish cynicism, then the mantra that "data is the new oil" is as good as they come. Although its first recorded uttering goes as far back as 2006, in recent times it has achieved the status of an approved corporate cliche, though nowadays "data" is generally...

LIFE / Digital

Aug 27, 2013

Banish trolls but the Net needs anonymity

So the proprietor of the Huffington Post has decided to ban anonymous commenting from the site, starting in mid-September. Speaking to reporters after a conference in Boston, Massachusetts, Arianna Huffington said: "Trolls are just getting more and more aggressive and uglier and I just came from London...

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By Tomoko Otake

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