Produced and hosted by Jon Gordon, Future Tense brings you the latest technology topics in daily five-minute capsules. From electronic privacy and digital democracy to spam and computer worms, Future Tense keeps you up to date on the rapidly changing world of technology.
Future Tense is heard in the United States during broadcasts of the CBC's As It Happens.
Regarding our recent story on the term "unfriend" being named the Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year, we heard from a number of people who say they've never heard anyone say "unfriend," but rather, they hear and use "defriend" instead -- as in, "I defriended her on Facebook because she was always sending me stupid quizzes." Ammon Shea from Oxford University Press was gracious enough to talk to us again to clear up this "unfriend" versus "defriend" issue.
Also today: Part two of our interview with David Michel-Davies regarding the most important Internet events of the decade.
In Wired magazine, Nicholas Thompson writes about system known as Dead Hand. It was designed by Soviet scientists in the mid 1980s to automatically retaliate against a nuclear strike from the U.S.
A recognized genius in mathematics, cryptography, and computer science, Alan Turing cracked German naval code in World War II, and is thought to be the father of modern computer science. Despite his achievements he was treated poorly in his home country of Great Britain, which prosecuted him for homosexual acts, which were illegal at the time. That treatment likely led to his suicide in 1954 at the age of 41.
John Graham-Cumming, a British computer programmer, believes Turing is owed an apology.
Geocities allowed users to design personal websites. but the pioneering service has long since been eclipsed by blogs and social networks.
What will become of the million-plus GeoCities home pages out there? Yahoo is saying only that it will provide details later this summer on how customers can save their own data.
Jason Scott believes GeoCities deserves saving. Scott runs textfiles.com, a site devoted to computer history. He's lead organizer for a new group called the Archive Team, which is working to rescue a growing body of endangered Internet content, including GeoCities.
John McCain and Barack Obama are engaged in an advertising contest on the Internet, where both are buying up keywords from the likes of Google and Yahoo. Ads for the campaigns appear in results when surfers search on keywords and phrases like "Iraq war" and "bailout."
But McCain is besting Obama in search engine advertising, according to a story in Advertising Age magazine.
German scientists have developed a computer system to reconstruct millions of files on citizens and informants that were destroyed by the Stasi -- the East German secret police.
After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Stasi tore up documents from its huge operation into jigsaw puzzle-size pieces. Those documents included meticulous observations on East Germans and foreigners deemed a threat to the state. About 15 people have been working at the Berlin archive for Stasi documents, piecing together scraps by hand. But that process has only produced an average of 10 documents a day, and at that rate could take 400 years to get through 16,000 sacks of files.
A consortium of scientists says the process can be greatly speeded up and will take just five years with its new computer scanning system.
