The Internet of Things is becoming a surveillance nightmare

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Security guru Bruce Schneier said, “Surveillance is the business model of the Internet. We build systems that spy on people in exchange for services. Corporations call it marketing.” The nature of these services tends to obscure our true relationship to companies like Facebook or Google. As the saying goes, if you don’t pay for a product, you are the product.

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Study finds Immigrants are driving billion-dollar startups

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They’re creating an average of 760 U.S. jobs each, the study finds. Space X’s Elon Musk, Zenefits’ Laks Srini, Uber’s Garrett Camp, and Palentir’s Peter Thiel are all founders of billion-dollar startups and they’re also all immigrants.

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Drone Races a McLaren Supercar

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To help promote the World Drone Prix in Dubai, the organizers enlisted the help of the local police, who had a McLaren 650s in their garage. The McLaren 650s went head-to-head against a high-speed racing drone. The Tron-like footage is just wonderful.

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Groundfridge prefab root cellar will take you back to your roots

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Before there were electric fridges, many people had root cellars. Those were essentially underground rooms with stable cool temperatures year round. You can now buy a Groundfridge from Weltevree, the company co-founded by designer Floris Schoonderbeek, famous for the Dutch Tub.

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Five-Part Sharing-Economy Solution to the Refugee Crisis

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Futurist Thomas Frey:  A few weeks ago I was asked to appear on CCTV, the Chinese-American television channel for an interview about the topic of border walls.

With the crisis in Syria deepening, affecting bordering countries and virtually all of the European Union, the show’s moderator asked me a series of tough questions about immigration trends and whether border walls, like the one proposed in Hungary, would become a growing trend.

In retrospect, the thoughts I conveyed on-air to this complex situation were not as crystallized as they could have been, forcing me to rethink my responses.

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Probability of Singularity in Question

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There is a hypothesis by Theodore Modis, that we can expect the rate of technological progress to begin slowing soon, because contrary to Ray Kurzweil, and ilk, technological progress is not exponential, it is logistical.

Modis argues that the exponential growth in technology is a fallacy and that the true nature of the growth is logistic.

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Uber has made a real difference for women in Saudi Arabia

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Women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. That leaves women reliant on male relatives or paid services to get to stores, school, and (increasingly) work. So when Uber launched in Riyadh in early 2014, its impact went beyond the general convenience of tech-enhanced ride hailing. The company has made a real difference in Saudi women’s mobility.

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Yahoo: The number of mobile ‘addicts’ up 60% in the last year

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Are you constantly checking your smartphone?  Are you opening apps on it more than 60 times a day?  If so, you are not alone.  Right now throughout the world there are more than 280 million of these so-called “mobile addicts”, according to recently shared statistics by Flurry, an app analytics company that Yahoo bought last year.   Continue reading… “Yahoo: The number of mobile ‘addicts’ up 60% in the last year”

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