John Naughton - The Japan Times

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John Naughton

LIFE / Digital

Aug 20, 2013

Britain's new 'smart meters' not so clever

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make credulous. In the case of technology, especially technology involving computers, that's pretty easy to do. Quite why people are so overawed by computers when they are blasé about, say, truly miraculous technologies such as high-speed trains, is a...

LIFE / Digital

Aug 6, 2013

Manning case tests computer fraud laws' credibility

Do you think that, as a society, the United States has become a basket case? Well, join the club. I'm not just thinking of the country's dysfunctional Congress, pathological infatuation with firearms, addiction to litigation, crazy healthcare arrangements, engorged prison system, chronic inequality,...

LIFE / Digital

Jul 30, 2013

Post-Snowden, the days of the global Internet are numbered

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world.

LIFE / Digital

Jul 23, 2013

How Microsoft spent a decade asleep on the job

Once upon a time, a young man named Bill had a vision. He saw "a PC on every desk, and every machine running Microsoft software." And lo, it came to pass, and the company Bill cofounded became a gigantic machine for making money, and Bill became the richest man on Earth.

LIFE / Digital

Jul 16, 2013

A different metaphor for China's firewall

Two years ago, when it was discovered that a U.S. intelligence agency was pouring millions of dollars into a research project on "metaphor," some people thought it was a delayed April Fool's joke. This columnist begged to differ, on the grounds that metaphors are the way that most of us make sense of...

LIFE / Digital

Jul 9, 2013

We are the sum of our metadata

Over the past two weeks, I have lost count of the number of officials and government ministers who, when challenged about Internet surveillance by Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, try to reassure their citizens by saying...

LIFE / Digital

Jul 3, 2013

Porn: Do we really want ISPs to censor?

Dearly beloved: our subject this morning is online pornography and what to do about it. The fact that there is a good deal of erotic material on the Internet is beyond dispute, though the precise amount is unclear. Let us assume that X percent of websites contain porn, where X is a number between five...

LIFE / Digital

Jun 26, 2013

Beware: NSA knows the power of your metadata

"To be remembered after we are dead," wrote William Hazlitt, "is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living." Cue U.S. President "George W" Obama in the matter of telephone surveillance by his National Security Agency. The fact that for the past seven years the agency has,...

LIFE / Digital

Jun 19, 2013

The NSA has us all trapped

Watching British Foreign Secretary William Hague doing his avuncular routine in the Commons on June 10, I was reminded of the way establishment figures in the 1950s used to reassure hoi polloi that they had nothing to worry about. Everything was in order. The Right Chaps were in charge. Citizens who...

LIFE / Digital

Jun 12, 2013

You're not a customer, you're just a user

A reader writes: "Dear John Naughton, As you write about the Internet, I wondered if you knew how long it takes Yahoo to get back to people. I have an iPad, but went to the library to print a document (attached to an email). Yahoo knew I wasn't on my iPad and asked me to name my favorite uncle. I replied,...

Japan Times

LIFE / Digital

Jun 5, 2013

Do self-driving cars need to cost so much?

"The best is the enemy of the good," said the 18th-century French writer Voltaire. It's a maxim that has a particular resonance for tech designers, because it highlights the intrinsic tension between ambition and pragmatism that haunts them. Many perfectly viable products have never made it beyond the...

LIFE / Digital

May 29, 2013

Online titans to profit from nostalgia

You may have noticed the hullabaloo last week over the news that Yahoo!, a weighty Internet giant, had paid $1.1 billion to acquire Tumblr, a blogging platform allegedly popular with the yoof of today.

Japan Times

LIFE / Digital

May 22, 2013

Is computing speed set to make a quantum leap?

"Our imagination is stretched to the utmost," wrote Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist of his day, "not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there." Which is another way of saying that physics is weird. And particle physics —...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Books

May 19, 2013

Google's big hitters' most ambitious predictions yet

When, in early 2011, Eric Schmidt stepped aside from his position as Google's CEO to become the company's executive chairman, some of us were reminded of Dean Acheson's famous gibe about postwar Britain — which had "lost an empire but not yet found a role." What would Dr. Schmidt's new role be,...

LIFE / Digital

May 15, 2013

Crude 3-D print tech will make a big bang

The news that a few jokers in Texas calling themselves Defense Distributed have succeeded in creating a working handgun using 3-D printing technology has thrown the cat into the pigeon coop. The reaction from legislators in the United States has been hyperactive. Democratic Congressman Steve Israel from...

LIFE / Digital

May 8, 2013

Google Glass, half full or half empty?

The Chinese name their years after animals — the year of the goat, the rat and so on. In the tech world, we name years after devices. Thus, 2007 was the year of the iPhone and 2010 was the year of the iPad. It's beginning to look as though 2013 will be the year of Glass. This prediction is based...

LIFE / Digital

May 1, 2013

Fragile systems make twits of us all

On Tuesday, April 23, a tweet from Associated Press (AP) revealed startling news. There had been explosions in the White House and Obama had been injured. The tweet was a hoax — the AP Twitter account had been hacked via a clever phishing exploit — but it briefly caused havoc. The Dow Jones...

LIFE / Digital

Apr 24, 2013

Why big IT projects go wrong

In 1975, a computer scientist named Fred Brooks published one of the seminal texts in the literature of computing. It had the intriguing title of "The Mythical Man-Month" and it consisted simply of a set of essays on the art of managing large software projects. Between its covers is distilled more wisdom...

LIFE / Digital

Apr 17, 2013

Facebook spreads like a virus with no cure

Infectious diseases, says the World Health Organization, "are caused by pathogenic microorganisms, such as bacteria, viruses, parasites or fungi; the diseases can be spread, directly or indirectly, from one person to another." Quite so. Just like Facebook addiction, which also spreads from person to...

LIFE / Digital

Apr 10, 2013

Bitcoin has financial powers nervous

Among the many unpleasant discoveries made by those who stashed their cash in Cypriot banks is that the island's government could stop them moving their money elsewhere. Capital controls are supposed to be a thing of the past, a figment of the pre-globalized world. But it turns out that when banks are...

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By Tomoko Otake

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