…we talked all the time, every night, and now I don’t have a phone, and I’ve lost all those numbers. It’s terrible. I can’t stop crying about it. I had…

…of phone phreakers threatened with arrest in 1962: a handful.5 Number of phone phreakers threatened with arrest in 1962 who went on to become any Ivy League professor and famous…

…doxing is a low-tech form of hacking in which information is valuable resource to be exploited. Doxing is controversial because it has been used to humiliate, shame, and intimidate intended…

…It is, indeed, visually uninspiring, but this is because it is meant to be basic. Like much of IKEA’s product line, it is mass-produced, economical modernism. It is meant to…

…is implemented by the Centre de Recherche en Santé de Nouna (CRSN), a national health research center. It is funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and supported by…

…called ISIL? ISIS? IS? What did Da’esh even mean? It had all been a big mess back when I was in kindergarten, and then it had settled down… Until now….

…failed unconditionally. In fact, microfinance has been a wild, improbable, impressive success in important ways. Microfinance grew fast in Bangladesh, serving women whose families live on incomes that are low,…

…undergone two successive and important revolutions revolving around the very statistical and information technologies it depends on. Almost immediately after being elected, Rudolph Giuliani recruited William Bratton, who put into…

…audience that inequality is meaningless until it is made into a calculable unit. But once it is made measurable, there is much she can do. Using this full map and…

In winter of 2014, an inquiry from a journalist landed in my email inbox. His message opened innocently: “how can I can safely and effectively get plugged into the hacker…

…security capabilities remain undeployed by—or inaccessible to—their users. In one 2009 incident very important in thinking about such IoT-enabled hacking, Shi’ite insurgent forces in Iraq hacked U.S. military surveillance drones,…

…protocols in health settings lacking basic infrastructure. As critical global health scholars have shown, whether a test is used, how it is interpreted, and how it is acted on each…

…philosophically insurmountable for AI. In recent years, however, technologists have found a new workaround to the limits of AI. The “human computation” movement in computer science has advocated for “leveraging…

…is significantly cheaper than blood glucose monitoring, it has a very important role to play in settings where blood glucose monitoring is not accessible due to cost, or where blood…

…and custom-built servers in backyard sheds and basements; now it is kept in massive installations in cold regions of the world with inexpensive electricity and high-bandwidth Internet connections. It’s nearly…

…strain to influenza viruses isolated around Poyang and the discovery of the virus in healthy wild birds at the lake. Beginning in 2008, a group of researchers, including both international…

…in national development agencies usually associated with the kinds of large-scale infrastructure mega-projects that these institutions pioneered after World War II. Yet the current emphasis on “little” development devices cannot…

…an Army General. Nor could international organizations augment American resources: “At all times the infectious disease unit at WHO is running on a shoestring,” said an international health official. As…

…the incidence of other diseases (such as malaria) rises and interferes with the vaccine’s immunological response? Yet staggering the intervention into steps provides an opportunity to stop the trial if…

…that a technological intervention is also a political one is inscribed as a double meaning in his post’s title: “The Internet Enables Incubator Progress.” However, as in the previous example,…

…for political mobilization.[2] A Beautiful Toilet In 2008 EcoTact installed an IkoToilet in Mathare, the first and only installation to date in one of Nairobi’s low-income settlements. The Mathare IkoToilet…

…solution to a socially complex problem. It implies that belief in technology can itself turn into magical thinking, misapprehending the nature of the problem and forgetting larger truths in a…

…dominates the industry, its annual investor reports make it possible to trace menhaden through the global food chain from its reduction facility in Reedville, Virginia, and handful of factories in…

…inserted into any chulha to “improve” it. In principle, it can be made with clay rather than steel. The design is simple and flexible enough to be manufactured and diffused…

…is no powerfully constructive technology that is not also powerfully destructive in another direction, just as there is no great idea that cannot be greatly perverted for great harm…. Indeed,…

…in the first place.[9] The modern virtue of corporate and governmental “transparency” is often interpreted as simply releasing data, lots of it, often in its rawest form. This is akin…