WERU 89.9 FM Blue Hill, Maine Local News and Public Affairs Archives

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Technology has played an important role in the protests about the recent election in Iran – both for good and for ill. The Internet allowed protesters to communicate after the Iranian government effectively took control of the mass media. Deep packet inspection technology also allowed the Iranian government to monitor protesters emails and help identify those who were communicating via the Internet and what they were saying. The monitoring technology was supplied by western companies – who also supplied the same technologies to western governments, including the U.S., who are using it in much the same way the Iranian government is. Interestingly, the language we use to describe that activity is quite different depending on who is doing the monitoring.

 

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Producer/Host: Jim Campbell
Topic: Ever wanted to ask a specific question on the Internet and get a specific answer instead of a list of a gazillion links? Your time may be at hand!
Take a peek at www.wolframalpha.com or start.csail.mit.edu and put in some natural language questions and see what you think.

 

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Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

During this last month of WERU’s 20th Anniversary year, we’re digging a few old editions from the Electronic Cottage vault that seem to us to be just as relevant today as they were when they were first broadcast. In this edition from November 2004, we take a look at spam, the scourge of the Internet.
Everything in this years old edition is still true today, except one point.
The one exception is that spam is no longer just 40% of Internet email traffic. Estimates in April 2009 are that it comprises as much as 94% of Internet traffic. It seems that in some parts of the digital world, just as in the physical world, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

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Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Looking for some good news about personal privacy in cyberspace? Well, finally, there is some. On Data Privacy Day 2009, the Dutch metasearch engine www.ixquick.com announced that the search engine would no longer record users’ IP addresses. This is a big deal: here’s why.

 

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Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Topic: These days, we hear that the Internet is killing libraries. That would be a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of Mainers who find that today’s libraries are both “brick” and “click,” both physical spaces and gateways to the cyber world of information, including information we would have to pay for if we tried to access it ourselves.

 

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