Worldcrunch
SYRIA SLIDING BACK TO OPEN WAR Few had dared to consider the five-year-long conflict in Syria over. Yet for the past two months a fragile truce among some, though not all, the warring sides had offered a bit of hope that peace might not be too far off. Casualties were down, diplomats were talking, life […]
Among the many potential applications are the defense of digital copyright for photographers, and the end of the hassle of online passwords.
PARIS — This is a new kind of police investigation. It is a terrorist affair that touches the edges of childhood, psychological manipulation and social discontent. The protagonists of this story are a group of girls torn between their teenage troubles and the traps of a tormented time. Aged between 14 and 19, they come […]
Two German lawyers say the Facebook founder and CEO doesn’t do enough to stop hate speech.
“WAR CRIMES” ON SYRIAN HOSPITALS, SCHOOLS France and Turkey have denounced the bombing of five hospitals and two schools in Syria, labeling them as war crimes, the BBC reports. At least 50 people were killed by yesterday’s strikes in the Aleppo and Idlib provinces, the UN has said. Different warring parties are blaming one another. […]
Anti-colonialism’s echo: India balks at Mark Zuckerberg’s plans of offering free but limited Internet access, which is ultimately aimed at boosting Facebooks’ numbers. Will the rest of the world follow?
MACEDONIA CLOSES BORDER TO MIGRANTS Some 2,600 people are stranded on the Greek side of the border with Macedonia after the Balkan nation closed its borders to incoming migrants yesterday afternoon, AP reports. Macedonia, which is not an EU member, took similar steps for two days last week. The authorities are, however, allowing in migrants […]
German daily Hamburg Morgenpost is flipping the blue bird on the front page of its Thursday edition, which features a four-page analysis of “The Hate-Net,” and why more and more “thugs, haters and scatterbrains” go online to vent their anger. In the special edition, the paper focuses on social media users’ inability to tolerate other […]
Five years after the revolution that overthrew the Mubarak regime, Egypt’s security forces raided apartments and closed public space to send a very clear message
The fate of our personal data after death has become both a legal and economic issue. Online businesses such as Facebook and Google want to be able to monetize even dead users, while some families who want to erase accounts may find it problematic.
TURIN — In Brussels, it doesn’t matter if your 8-year-olds have a smartphone in their pockets with more computing power than the Rosetta space probe. The European Union passed a regulation this month that raised the legal age for the use of social media to 16, requiring parental consent before teenagers can open Facebook, Instagram, […]
Clarin, Dec. 2, 2015 “Father, millionaire* and caring,” Argentine daily Clarin joins some North American dailies in giving ample space on the front page Wednesday to news that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced, in the form of an open letter to their newborn daughter Max, that they will donate 99% […]
MSF DEMANDS KUNDUZ WAR CRIME PROBE Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said it will take the unprecedented step of calling on the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC) to investigate Saturday’s bombing by U.S. forces of its hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz that killed 22 people, swissinfo reports. FIRST SYRIAN AND RUSSIAN JOINT ATTACK Russian […]
Die Tageszeitung, Oct. 7, 2015 “In your face,” writes (in English) Berlin-based Die Tageszeitung on its Wednesday front page, one day after a landmark ruling by Europe’s highest court made it more dificult for Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and thousands of other companies to transfer users’ data from Europe to the United States. The famously tongue-in-cheek […]
If you ‘like’ extreme right-wing Facebook pages, this German will try to contact your boss, and perhaps the police. Is he going too far?
U.S. WORRIED OVER RUSSIAN BUILD-UP IN SYRIA U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov that Moscow’s continued support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “risks exacerbating and extending the conflict” amid growing concerns over reports of Moscow’s military build-up in Syria. Reuters reports that the Tuesday phone call between Kerry and […]
-OpEd- 

How important is intellectual property in the digital age? Not very, if the business strategies of industry luminaries like PayPal’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are any indication. Musk, the multi-talented entrepreneur behind PayPal, and more recently Tesla cars and SpaceX, has made it clear he considers Tesla’s impressive lead in battery and […]
Remember Gattaca? The superb film describes the contrasting fates of two brothers, one of whom was genetically optimized at birth. A few years later, in another movie, The Island, a community of prisoners discovers one day they are nothing but clones of super-privileged people and that their sole purpose is to provide fresh organs as […]
From Facebook to Google, Baidu to VKontakte, the world’s biggest technology companies talk about their singular dedication to their users. Yet the road to becoming a global tech titan is inevitably lined with hard choices and conflicts of interest. Here are five prominent controversies where companies are accused of ceding to questionable demands of the […]
PARIS — First there was the campus. Next up Facebook city. The size of the “Zee town” project Mark Zuckerberg announced in February surprised many: For an estimated $200 billion, the king of social networks plans to build what will essentialy be an entire town — a 200-acre development in California’s Silicon Valley featuring supermarkets, […]
Cumhuriyet, April 7, 2015 “Half Democracy,” Tuesday’s front page of Turkey’s center-left daily Cumhuriyet reads, after the government imposed a nationwide ban on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook Monday. The accompanying picture depicts a man divided between “CENSORSHIP” and “VIOLENCE.” Turkish authorities have now lifted the ban, which had been implemented in an attempt to prevent […]
ALLIES CONSIDER GROUND TROOPS IN YEMENAirstrikes against Shia Houthi rebels in Yemen from a Saudi Arabia-led coalition have continued for a second day. At least 39 civilians have been killed in the strikes, according to AFP. Yesterday, Egypt said it was ready to send its navy and ground troops to Yemen to fight the Houthi […]
This 53-year-old German encryption coder helped the U.S. whistleblower stay one step ahead of the NSA. Now, he’s getting financial support from some big players to expand his work.
Governments are taking Twitter to task for inadvertently helping jihadists “recruit, incite and horrify.” But they’re forgetting what a valuable law enforcement resource the platform is too.
A hard European retort to an attitude that extends from Silicon Valley to the White House, which says that the United States’ dominance in new technology should give it free license abroad.
And it will happen sooner than you think…
Though some top executives have learned the art of apologizing, others compound their company’s PR problems by failing to take responsibility. Welcome to the “aquarium!”
The dominant economic idea used to be to cut all barriers to capital flows, the so-called Washington Consensus. But since the 2008 financial collapse, the tech industry’s hold on global consumption rules the day, and anything impeding it is considere
For Renaud Laplanche, it all began with a credit card statement that seemed all wrong. Now, after helping to bring banking into the digital era, it’s time for a major IPO for his SF-based firm.
Looking at the business fundamentals, there are both very good and very bad signs for Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella. Is there a (positive) lesson in IBM’s evolution?
Learning Mandarin is just part of the Facebook founder’s ambitious but subtle strategy to return to the Chinese market. Huo Yuanjia (and Ang Lee) would be proud.
Chinese have looked skeptically at charitable organizations, for cultural reasons and a series of scandals. But as China’s rich and famous join the ALS challenge, something may be changing.
EICHSTATT —Camillo the cat nearly missed his TV appearance. The one-year-old feline belongs to the Auer family in the this Bavarian town of 14,000, but he is anything but a house cat. No, Camillo spends his days and nights attending parties around town, visiting art galleries, and catching a cat nap in a comfortable chair […]
In many countries, musicians were Latin America’s leading social critics and political activists of the late 20th century. Not anymore.
GENEVA — It used to be that friendships ended in all sorts of ways. But these days, we simply “unfriend” instead. From the playground to Facebook, the process has evolved. You put the cursor on the name of the person you want out of your life, you slide over to the “Friends” button, let the […]
The social network measures up worse than other Internet sites. Part of the problem is that people’s expectations are unrealistically high that Facebook can improve their lives, for real.
With rumblings that young people are disenchanted with the social network, a reporter visits the Harvard University campus where Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook 10 years ago.
From Twitter to Dropbox to Airbnb, where office life is the good life.
Google is leading a project in Brazil to use balloons to bring Internet connection to the remote corners of the Amazon.
MUNICH — It only takes two minutes to gather enough material to make a person squirm or provoke them to pick up the phone to call a lawyer. Two minutes to see that racism flourishes not only on the fringes but also in the heart of our societies, in the minds of philosophy students and […]