Just posted: The Kremlin's Virtual Army

Posted By Blake Hounshell Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - 6:23 PM

Check out this new piece by Evgeny Morozov on how Russian bloggers have responded to the war in Georgia:

The Kremlin's Virtual Army
Shadowy hackers in Moscow and St. Petersburg? Old news. Get ready for the next generation of Russian cyberwarriors.

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EXPLORE:NET EFFECT, CAUCASUS, GEORGIA, INTERNET, RUSSIA

Esquire to publish "e-ink" cover

Posted By Blake Hounshell Tuesday, July 22, 2008 - 5:00 PM

The September cover of Esquire is going to be pretty cool. An electronic ink diplay, built on the same technology that E Ink used in the Amazon Kindle, will flash the words "the 21st Century Begins." The logistics of pulling of this feat are a story in globalization:

First Esquire had to make a six-figure investment to hire an engineer in China to develop a battery small enough to be inserted in the magazine cover. The batteries and the display case are manufactured and put together in China. They are shipped to Texas and on to Mexico, where the device is inserted by hand into each magazine. The issues will then be shipped via trucks, which will be refrigerated to preserve the batteries, to the magazine's distributor in Glazer, Ky.

So, has the magical world of Harry Potter and its animated Daily Prophet sprung into being? Esquire Editor-in-Chief David Granger sees a bright future for e-ink:

Pointing to the prototype sitting on a conference room table, Mr. Granger said, "The possibilities of print have just begun. In two years, I hope this looks like cellphones did in 1982, or car phones."

Alternatively, it could look a lot like this.

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EXPLORE:NET EFFECT, GLOBALIZATION, MEDIA, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Outsource your homework to India

Posted By Blake Hounshell Friday, June 27, 2008 - 9:34 AM

More outsourcing to India. This time, it's homework:

Students studying computing in the UK and US are outsourcing their university coursework to graduates in India and Romania. Work is being contracted out for as little as £5 on contract coding websites usually used by businesses. Students are outsourcing everything from simple coursework to full blown final year dissertations. It's causing a major headache for lecturers who say it is almost impossible to detect."

Slashdot's CmdrTaco cracks,"The irony, of course, is that if they actually get jobs in the sector, this will be how they actually work anyway."

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EXPLORE:NET EFFECT, BUSINESS, EDUCATION, INDIA, INTERNET, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

'Ecomodding' is all the rage

Posted By Blake Hounshell Thursday, June 26, 2008 - 8:47 AM

I'll believe this is a real trend when Vin Diesel makes a movie called The Fast and the Fuel-Efficient:

Today, ecomodding is rapidly becoming a movement. Forums devoted to ecomodding specific vehicles — such as priuschat.com and metrompg.com — are launched frequently and gain popularity rapidly.

One site, ecomodder.com, went online in December 2007 and 45,000 readers were checking in daily within three months. "It just sorta went viral," says Darin Cosgrove, 38, of Brockville, Canada, who cofounded the site with Benjamin Jones, 19, of Hanover, New Hampshire. [...]

With advice gleaned from the forums, Cosgrove yanked the gas engine and installed an electric drivetrain using donated lead-acid batteries and about $700 in parts scrounged from an old forklift and a golf cart. Today, he drives the electric car around town, getting what he figures is the equivalent of 80 mpg. For highway trips, he still uses gasoline, but in an ecomodded '98 Geo Metro that now gets 76 mpg, up from its original EPA highway rating of 46 mpg.

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EXPLORE:NET EFFECT, NORTH AMERICA, ENVIRONMENT

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