With the rampant proliferation of fictitious stories that are presented as legitimate news, new methods of sorting out real information from faux news stories has become increasingly important, especially as the real-world implications of the manipulation of information on social media are becoming drastically more apparent.read more
The profound impact of the technology of social networking on our culture, especially social media juggernaut Facebook, is a phenomenon that is unique in human history, allowing friends, loved ones, and even complete strangers to connect from disparate corners of the interweb. Conversely, it has also been used to spread disinformation, such as in the case of Russian hackers meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, and for many it has also become the object of addictive behavior.read more
Over the past week, the African country of Liberia has been the target of a series of high-bandwidth directed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, nearly crippling the nation’s fledgling internet service.
The attacks originated from a network called Mirai botnet #14, intermittently flooding Libera’s networks with traffic of over 500 gigabits per second in bandwidth during each attack. Botnets consist of a network of thousands of "zombie computers", typically home computers that, unknown to their individual owners, have viruses or other malware that send out data when commended to by the controller of the malware.
read more
Are we forgetting more and caring less?or is there just too much to remember? More information has been produced and stored in the past 5 years than at any time in human history, in the form of e-mails, websites, cell phone messages, TV and print. Despite the fact that we’re constantly bombarded with what seems like information, very little of it actually adds anything to human knowledge.
read more