· December, 2013

Stories about Technology from December, 2013

South Korean Pres. Vows Pre-emptive Strikes on Social Media Rumors

  31 December 2013

Is South Korea government gearing up toward social media censorship? The latest official remark by President Park (full transcript [ko]) had Korean net users worried. Park, addressing “those rumors spreading via social media”, said “if the government let these things happen, it will bring chaos nationwide” and added “bear in mind that...

What It's Like Growing Up In The Maldives?

  28 December 2013

Journalist and blogger Hilath Rasheed shares a Maldivian's thoughts in Facebook on “How is it like growing up in Male'/Maldives”: From Ibrahim Lirar: The most honest answer I can give now is that “it is scary and constricting”. Information was so tightly control until recently. Very few among us grew...

Impact Of Social Media In The Delhi Elections

  25 December 2013

Prior to the Delhi Legislative Assembly election (4 December 2013) the Delhi Election Commission vowed to monitor the social media for political campaigns looking for breach of model code of conduct by the candidates. However the commission later said that there were loopholes in monitoring and it is virtually “impossible”...

Innovation: A Spell Checker for Bambara Language

  22 December 2013

Fasokan in Mali reports on the creation of an app to help spell check texts in Bambara [fr] : Il est disponible sur les traitements de texte et outils bureautiques libres et gratuit : Open Office, Libre Office, Néo Office, et sur les ordinateurs Windows, Mac, et Linux. Qu’est-ce qui...

Don't Just Retweet Blood Donation Requests. Donate!

  20 December 2013

Dr. Roshan Radhakrishnan at Godyears asserts the importance of donating blood and wonders about the fate of all the blood request retweets in his Twitter timeline: Does anyone ever come to the aid of those tweets? Do you honestly know anyone who has seen a retweet and taken a break...

Japan's Open Data Catalog Launches Beta Version

  20 December 2013

Data.go.jp, a website that aggregates publicly available data by Ministries and Agencies of the Japanese government, launched its Beta version on December 20, 2013. Datasets by 21 governmental organizations and 567 groups are available under Creative Commons License Attribution 2.1 Japan detailed in the Terms of Use. This comes as a...

Bangla Blogging Community Gears Up For The Fifth Bangla Blog Day

  18 December 2013

On December 15, 2005, Bangla Blogging started its journey through the largest Bangla Blogging platform Somewherein.net [bn] and the community grew larger every year. A section of the Bangla bloggers’ community started to observe December 19 as Bangla Blog Day since 2009. The fifth Bangla Blog day will be celebrated...

Made in Togo: A 3D Printer Built from Recycled E-Waste

  18 December 2013

Afaté GNIKOU is an IT engineer in Togo who wanted to tackle two important goals: create the first 3D printer from Togo,  reduce the alarming number of E-waste dumped into his country.  Here is a presentation of the 3D printer project, called W.AFATE : A. Gnikou is a member of...

A French Version of NSA Electronic Surveillance Program?

  16 December 2013

Etienne Papin, a Paris-based lawyer expert in internet rights, explains the details of a bill that was approved by the French Senate on December 10: La loi de programmation militaire (Military Planning Act). He describes the bill as the French version of NSA mass electronic surveillance data mining program [fr]...