 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
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.
Sponsors
Listen - Download MP3 - iTunes
The Open Source Digital Voting Foundation is spearheading a project to build new voting machines to replace proprietary systems currently in place. The group is in the second year of a an eight-year plan to produce a publicly-owned, open source election system. OSDV has turned loose its first batch of software code for technical review.
Listen - Download MP3 - iTunes
Part 2 of our interview with John Arquilla, Naval Postgraduate School
Listen - Download MP3 - iTunes
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.
Thompson's new book on the cold war is The Hawk and the Dove.
President Obama has made it a top priority to assemble a White House-based team to fight Internet-based crime and defend the country against cyber attack, but first he has to find a person willing and able to lead the effort. Yesterday the interim cyber czar, Melissa Hathway, resigned, saying she's frustrated over the administration's delay in filling the post. Siobhan Gorman, intelligence correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, says some of the president's advisers had apparently turned against Hathaway.
Researchers at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University analyzed about 35,000 active Arabic language Weblogs in 18 different countries. One of the more interesting findings, according to Harvard's Bruce Etling, is bloggers tend to write mostly about their own towns and countries rather than wider, regional issues.
Facebook executive Chris Kelly, former eBay C.E.O. Meg Whitman, former eBay executive Steve Westly, former tech startup C.E.O. Steve Poizner, and former Hewlett Packard C.E.O. Carly Fiorina have either announced their candidacies for statewide office in California, or at least expressed interest. What's with with the rash of Silicon Valley luminaries enterting politics? I put that question to Owen Thomas of Valleywag.
Listen to a longer, mostly unedited version of my interview with Thomas.
Public Printer is not the kind of job one would normally launch a high-profile public campaign to land. But Carl Malamud believes that head poobah of the U.S. Government Printing Office is such a cool and important gig that he's asking for the job from a dedicated Web site, Yes We Scan.
While President Obama has been widely praised for his use of the Internet to communicate with the public, not all are happy. For example privacy groups have raised a stink over President Obama's use of Google's YouTube as the primary distributor of weekly video addresses on the WhiteHouse.gov Website.
Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation objected to YouTube's use of small files known as "cookies" that track users' movements across the Web. The White House is now using a different video provider.
President Obama is promising to use the Web site Recovery.gov to track spending under the economic stimulus bill passed by the U.S. House and being considered by the Senate. But that site hasn't been built yet. Until then, you can follow requests for stimulus money coming from local governments on Stimulus Watch. The new site relies on public contributions - a process sometimes called "crowdsourcing" - to help monitor stimulus spending.
Barack Obama's use of the Internet during his campaign and transition has been so effective we're all expecting him to transform Washington in the same way. But the federal government is a different beast than a campaign.
Guest: Evan Ratliff, Wired
Barack Obama says he's still clinging to his BlackBerry, but it looks like aides will pry the smart phone from the presidential hands in short order. The Secret Service and Obama's lawyers say the Verizon BlackBerry 8830 World Edition phone is too much of a security risk and legal liability.
Guest: Maggie Reardon, CNET News.com
She ran eBay. Now she wants Schwarzenegger's job.
Political observers say former eBay chief Meg Whitman is preparing to run for California governor in 2010.
Guest: Mary Anne Ostrom, San Jose Mercury News
A panel of government and industry experts is urging President-elect Barack Obama to create a new White House office to protect the country from malicious hackers and Internet attacks from foreign governments.
Because cyber attacks are so frequent the government should give them the same level of attention as threats from weapons of mass destruction and global jihad, said James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
For more on this topic, listen to today's Midmorning broadcast:
During his campaign Barack Obama leveraged the Web, social networks, text messaging and e-mail to amass supporters and money. The question now: Will Obama use his millions of Internet friends to help him run the country and bring change to Washington?
Today we feature an interview with Jonathan Taplin of the USC Annenberg School for Communication, who recently analyzed the tech policy platforms of the presidential candidates. We talked about President-elect Barack Obama's positions on broadband, net neutrality, and electronic privacy.
Here's John McCain talking tech at the All Things D conference in 2007.
David Ewing Duncan writes in the latest issue of Portfolio magazine, "While we're spending hundreds of billions to bail out financial institutions, why not also bail in the future by investing more in science and technology?"
The government should pour money into things like green technology and basic infrastructure, said Duncan, who's written for the Atlantic, National Geographic, and the New York Times.
Today's guest is Steve Baker, author of The Numerati, a new book that explains how a growing group of elite mathematicians is tracking our behavior and predicting what we'll do next. 
These math whizzes use sophisticated data mining techniques to analyze the bits of information we leave behind when we surf the Internet, purchase goods on credit cards, and generally live our lives.
The Numerati in political consulting firms are helping candidates 'microtarget' swing voters in key states, according to Baker.
