Technology | Praxis

Pokémon Go’s Popularity Is Fading

Pokemon Go is starting to lose the battle for mobile mindshare, according to Axiom Capital Management. As such, investors and executives at Facebook Inc., Instagram, Tinder (Match Group Inc.), Twitter Inc., and Snapchat can breathe a sigh of relief, says Senior Analyst Victor Anthony. “Given the rapid rise in usage of the Pokémon Go app since the launch in July, investors have been concerned that this new user experience has been detracting from time spent on other mobile focused apps,” he writes. Enthusiasm about the…

The Life and Death of Gopher, the Internet Before the Web

On March 18, in a conference room of the hotel, Berners-Lee presented one possible breakthrough: the World Wide Web. It was evening. Many of the 530 conference attendees had already gone to the bar or to dinner. To the curious who stayed behind, Berners-Lee explained that the Web could be used to connect all the information on the internet through hyperlinks. You could click on a word or a phrase in a document and immediately retrieve a related document, click again on a phrase in…

3D Printing Is Coming Soon to a Restaurant Near You

Back in 2013, when NASA was still setting its sights on a human mission to Mars, a team of Texas researchers won a federal grant to build a 3D printer that could pump out customized food in space. The natural first choice for a demo? Pizza, of course. But just after the first version was finished and a second grant was due to arrive, researcher Anjan Contractor and his team at the Systems and Materials Research Corporation in Austin, Texas, received the discouraging news that…

Facebook Tries to Block Ad Blockers

Digital ads pop up online so frequently and ubiquitously that many people are using software to block them. But if you try to stop ads from showing up on Facebook’s desktop website, you will now be out of luck: The social network has found a way to block the ad blockers. On Tuesday, Facebook flipped a switch on its desktop website that essentially renders all ad blockers — the programs that prevent websites from displaying ads on the page when a user visits the site…

NSA Monitoring Users of Privacy Software Funded by U.S. Government

Use of common Web privacy tools or even mere curiosity about them could get you added to a National Security Agency watch list, according to a new report. The NSA surveillance program called X-Keyscore, first revealed last summer in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, has been found to contain selection rules that potentially add to an NSA watch list anybody who has not only used, but visited online privacy-protection tools such as the Tor Network for anonymous Web browsing and the Linux-based Tails operating system….

Quantum Computing Applied to Encryption Is a Giant Leap Forward

This perennial quest for a perfectly secure message spurred Seth Lloyd, a professor of quantum information at MIT, to put forth a theory of quantum enigma machines in 2013. This device, which derives its name from a Nazi-era cipher machine called Enigma, would use the quantum states of individual photons to encode and encrypt messages by altering properties of the photon wave, such as amplitude or wavelength. Unlike quantum key distribution, which uses principles of quantum mechanics to encrypt messages which are then sent over…

Are Electronic Voting Machines Vulnerable to Hackers?

The revelation this month that a cyberattack on the DNC is the handiwork of Russian state security personnel has set off alarm bells across the country: Some officials have suggested that 2016 could see more serious efforts to interfere directly with the American election. The DNC hack, in a way, has compelled the public to ask the precise question the Princeton group hoped they’d have asked earlier, back when they were turning voting machines into arcade games: If motivated programmers could pull a stunt like…

Religious People Are Skeptics When It Comes to Biotechnology and Humans

Many Americans are wary of the prospect of implanting a computer chip in their brains to improve their mental abilities or adding synthetic blood to their veins to make them stronger and faster, according to a major new Pew Research Center survey gauging the public’s views on technologies that could enhance human abilities. And this is particularly true of those who are highly religious. For instance, a majority of highly religious Americans (based on an index of common religious measures) say they would not want…

Sorry Apple Diehards, the iPad Is Still Not a Real Computer

Don’t deny it, folks who prefer the iPad to the Mac or PC: you like the challenge! It was awesome to check out and edit files in my company’s Github repo and make a pull request, all from the iPad. Myke Hurley made an observation on his Analog(ue) podcast that even if you could prove that a given task was easier on the Mac, he’d still rather do it on his iPad because it’s just more fun. I absolutely get that. Yet there’s an irony…

Like It or Not, Genetically Modified Food Can Prevent Starvation

There’s a food crisis looming over India. Farmers in the country currently lose some Rs50,000 crore ($5 billion) every year to pests and diseases. Droughts, coupled with a lack of irrigation facilities, are exacerbating the problem. Prices for pulses—a category of grains that includes lentils and chickpeas, which are staples for Indians—have been rising lately. The situation may only worsen as the United Nations estimates that the country’s population, currently at 1.2 billion, will reach 1.8 billion by 2050. Scientists already have a solution: genetically…

Understanding the present is the key to the future