FREE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY BLOG FOR PROFESSIONALS

America has successfully launched national innovation missions time and again. These missions have delivered life-saving drugs, sparked the computer and internet revolutions, and put humans on the moon. Most recently, the US government has poured billions of dollars into a national innovation campaign to help pharmaceutical companies develop vaccines and therapeutics for covid-19. Yet the United States has not launched such a mission to counter the gravest threat of our time: climate change. Although a few clean-energy technologies, such as wind and solar power, have reached cost competitiveness with fossil fuels, many more urgently need advances if the world is to achieve net-zero carbon emissions—a herculean feat known as “deep decarbonization.” Now is the time for the United States to launch a National Energy Innovation Mission to speed such energy transitions around the world—and build competitive, job-creating industries at home. Today, we and our coauthors published “ Energizin...

If you need a reason to feel good about the direction technology is going, look up Dell Technologies CTO John Roese on Twitter. The handle he composed back in 2006 is @theICToptimist. ICT stands for information and communication. This podcast episode was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not produced by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. “The reason for that acronym was because I firmly believed that the future was not about information technology and communication technology independently,” says Roese, president and chief technology officer of products and operations at Dell Technologies. “It was about them coming together.” Close to two decades later, it’s hard not to call him right. Organizations are looking to the massive amounts of data they’re collecting and generating to become fully digital, they’re using the cloud to process and store all that data, and they’re turning to new wireless technologies like 5G to power data-hun...

On Monday, India banned TikTok and dozens of other apps made in China, escalating tension between the countries two weeks after a long-simmering border dispute in the Himalayas turned deadly . The news: In a statement , India said the apps “engaged in activities which (are) prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.” Messaging and chat apps like Baidu and WeChat were on the list too , along with the popular microblogging site Weibo, several mobile games, and photo editing software. Why does it matter? Home to more than 1.3 billion people, India has a huge smartphone user base and English speaking population, which make it the world’s largest social media market. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that India is also TikTok’s biggest market , with nearly 191 million downloads at the end of 2019; the US is at a distant second with nearly 41 million. Social media has a troubling history in India. TikTok and WhatsApp have also...

I felt bad asking Zack Gray to repeat his story. He was used to it, he said. It’s the founding tale of his startup, Ophelia; he’d already told part of it in his commencement speech at Wharton, and to potential investors. “There was a girl in my life,” he started. “I call her my girlfriend. We met when I was 14.” They dated, on and off, and stayed friends. She was one of a generation who slid into opioid addiction through painkillers. A user for five years, she had the means to seek treatment after her addiction grew, but she didn’t want rehab or therapy. Then, last spring, the call came: she had overdosed. By the time Gray got to the hospital, she was gone. “I just started thinking, ‘What could I have done to prevent this?’” he said. To answer that question, he researched. Since he was finishing up his MBA, the approach that seemed obvious was to build some kind of business or service. What if his friend had been able to get medicine to treat the chemical condition of addiction, w...

American intelligence agencies are still falling short on security, years after high-profile data leaks from Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Joshua Schulte, according to a member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee. In a letter to Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Senator Ron Wyden uses a 2017 internal report from the CIA to detail the ways in which the intelligence community has continuously failed to protect itself.  “The intelligence community is still lagging behind and has failed to adopt even the most basic cybersecurity technologies in widespread use elsewhere in the federal government,” Wyden writes.  The report, which was obtained in redacted form by the Washington Post , details how the agency’s elite hacking unit favored building offensive cyber weapons while it failed to secure some of its most important systems, a pattern that led to the 2016 theft of hacking tools that were then published by WikiLeaks under the name “Vault 7.” American...

There is widespread agreement that the only way to safely reopen the economy is through a massive increase in testing. The US needs to test millions of people per day to effectively track and then contain the covid-19 pandemic. This is a tall order. The country tested only around 210,000 people per day last week , and the pace is not increasing fast enough to get to millions quickly. The urgency to do better is overwhelmingly bipartisan, with the most recent legislation adding $25 billion for testing a few days ago. Fears are growing, however, that testing might not scale in time to make a difference. As Senators Lamar Alexander and Roy Blunt wrote last week , “We have been talking with experts across the government and the private sector to find anyone who believes that current technology can produce the tens of millions of tests necessary to put this virus behind us. Unfortunately, we have yet to find anyone to do so.” We believe that it can be done. The scientific community has ...