Think Fidel Castro is going soft in his old age? A recently published report from Reporters Without Borders, “Going Online in Cuba: Internet Under Surveillance,” suggests you should think again. In fact, if authors Claire Voeux and Julien Pain with the French journalism organization are correct in their assessment, even the information age hasn’t changed much about daily life in this Caribbean nation of 11 million people. “With less than 2 percent of the population online, Cuba is one of the world’s most backward countries as regards Internet usage,” reads an excerpt. “The worst off by far in Latin America [...]
Last February wasn’t a good month for Terry Semel. Not only was the Yahoo! Chairman and CEO in the middle of an ambitious overseas expansion project, but his web search company had been called before Congress to testify about its involvement in a high-profile international incident. Bad news for any businessman, but for U.S. foreign policy it was a sudden and unsettling introduction to the reach of the information age. The trouble for Yahoo started with the jailing of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist who had been convicted of “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities” after an email he [...]
What’s the solution to world poverty? Some might say food aid; others, training and investment. But, for a growing number of international philanthropists, the next big thing for the Third World might just be the same force that’s been reshaping the First: technology. It all started at the 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, announced an ambitious plan to improve education and stimulate economic growth in the world’s poorest countries with the development of a $100 laptop. Just over a year later, One Laptop Per Child [...]
