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Posts Tagged ‘Significant Impact’

Illegal Immigration: There’s an App for That

From a group calling themselves Electronic Civil Disobedience comes the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a simple mobile application intended to aid and abet border-crossers from Mexico to the United States by mapping the safest routes to take.

This GPS app is built to work on the cheapest cell phones available. It brings to mind every petty-but-illegal transgression the casual user could commit and stretches the boundaries of the permissibility of tech’s uses for plausibly illegal means. The next time you use P2P or bit torrent clients to download media or use an iPhone app to detect police radars, think about this mobile application and how it reflects on American law and the Internet.

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The app seems to originate from a hacktivist group out of UCSD – hardly a historical hotbed of technological innovation, but close enough to the US-Mexican border to have a significant impact on the politics of technology in that area. The group also advocates DDoS-like digital sit-ins to bog down the resources of websites it deems offensive.

Hundreds of would-be immigrants are killed each year while trying to enter the United States.

Check out this Border Patrol YouTube video on the newly installed double-layered fencing between the U.S. and Mexico, a fence that stretches between 700 and 800 miles along the Rio Grande.

So, what do our readers think? Is a mobile app enabling illegal Mexican immigration to the U.S. a live-saving tool for those who seek better opportunities, or is it simply another law-breaking tool developed by tech hackers for life hackers, a workaround to cheat the system?

Discuss

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Red Hat tells Supremes: software patents stifle innovation

Red Hat has filed an amicus curiae brief in a major Supreme Court case. In the brief, Red Hat makes a strong case against software patents, arguing that the legal reasoning that led to software patents was flawed and that the pending Bilski case provides the Supreme Court with an important opportunity to rectify this long-standing problem with the patent system.

The Bilski case, which we have been following closely during its ascent through the courts, is a dispute that specifically relates to patents on methods for commodities trading. The case has raised new questions about the legitimacy of business methods patents and the basis on which such patents are granted. The outcome of the case could have a particularly significant impact on the software industry if the Supreme Court uses Bilski to redefine the boundaries of patentability in a way that excludes software.

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High-tech adoption happening faster, driving economic growth

If you’ve had the sense that new technologies are being adopted at an ever-accelerating pace, it’s probably not just your imagination. That’s the conclusion of a couple of economists who have modeled the adoption of 15 key technologies that have been developed over the past two centuries. They find a consistent acceleration of adoption across that entire period. And, although the pace of adoption has a significant impact on national economies, there’s a bigger variance between technologies than there is between nations.

The study was performed by two economists, one at Harvard, the other at New York’s Federal Reserve Bank. The basic premise was that it should be possible to build a single model that can estimate the pace at which a technological innovation can spread within a national economy. There are a lot of assumptions behind this model (not to mention over a dozen pages dedicated to equations and explanations of them), but the gist is relatively straightforward.

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Switched On: When netbooks suffer from ‘Droid rage

Ross Rubin (@rossrubin) contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Despite powering only a handful of handsets available on the market, Android has already had a significant impact on the competitive landscape in smartphones. Looking at its primary rivals that run on a variety of hardware from multiple manufacturers, Android has provided a free and highly customizable licensed challenge to Windows Mobile, And competition with the Google-developed mobile operating system may have also provided the final push of Symbian into the world of open source.

Just because Android has turned the tables, though, does not mean it should be used on devices that rest on them. Recently, the infatuation with Android has led to much speculation and supplication regarding the operating system as an alternative on netbooks and less proven “gaptops” that live between the smartphone and the notebook. But while blazing benchmarks may erase any speed records set by netbooks running Windows, they can’t erase what amounts to a weak case for Android on these devices.

Recent history shows that the overwhelming majority of consumers want Windows on their netbooks. This has become especially true as the market has shifted from the quasi-appliance like original Asus Eee, with its suboptimal 7″ screen, to most netbooks running 10″ and now even larger screens and vendors such as Dell and HP that are pillars of the Windows hardware world have grabbed market share. Even these manufacturers have more to gain by going with their own twist on Linux. HP, for example, has created a unique and differentiated experience with its Linux environment for netbooks. It will take some time before various Android implementations are so unique. It’s unclear why an Android-based netbook would fare much better than Linux-based netbooks have.

Continue reading Switched On: When netbooks suffer from ‘Droid rage

Filed under: Laptops

Switched On: When netbooks suffer from ‘Droid rage originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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