After six months of contentious debate over U.S. National Security Agency surveillance programs, prompted by leaks from former government contractor Edward Snowden, the third week in December may have marked a major turning point.
Politics collided with the world of technology this year as stories about U.S. government spying stirred angst both among the country's citizens and foreign governments, and the flawed HeathCare.gov site got American health-care reform off to a rocky start. Meanwhile, the post-PC era put aging tech giants under pressure to reinvent themselves. Here in no particular order are IDG News Service's picks for the top 10 tech stories of the year.
The US presidential election result leaves President Barack Obama in the White House and maintains the balance of power in Congress. In many longstanding technology debates, policy experts see little movement forward, although lawmakers may look for compromises on a handful of issues.
With the U.S. presidential election on Tuesday, it's fair to say that technology policy hasn't risen to the top of the agenda in the debate between President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
Obama's appointment of Vivek Kundra marks an important first step for rectifying the nation's concerns about IT.
The press has been all over President-Elect Barack Obama's addiction to his BlackBerry and the possibility that he might have to give it up for reasons of national security. But no one in the media seems to be asking the most logical follow-up question: Is the cybertechnology that can compromise the future chief executive's BlackBerry also a threat to mobile devices being used every day by thousands of senior executives in corporate America?
Could Barack Obama ever expect to continue using his BlackBerry once he officially becomes president?
Despite reports all day long about an assortment of e-voting machine problems in several US states, no massive systemic meltdown occurred.
Google Trends provides some great insight into what people are thinking about, even if they don't always help us to understand what this insight means in terms of the candidates' positioning.
Blog mentions are, like search terms, something of a special case. They probably show the least conclusive representation of candidate support, because there is no way to assess whether such mentions reflect a preponderance of positive or negative evaluations of the candidates. Anecdotal evidence suggests that negative mentions of candidate A by blogs supporting candidate B, and vice-versa, are very common indeed.
When you take a close look at the traffic patterns within the Web 2.0-based community, the popularity gap between the two presidential candidates increases. Obama's favored by a 4-to-1 margin compared with the 2-to-1 margin when we looked at other Internet Web traffic trends.
The tale told by other Internet traffic trends, also rings true when taking domain registration into account. Using DomainTools to query for domains, we saw 2,357 domains for Obama and 1,431 domains for McCain.
IT professionals have historically monitored network traffic patterns to better understand network usage, to expose security events, and to generally promote overall network health. Traffic analysis can likewise be applied to the Web to understand a wide range of behavior patterns ranging from social media networks to suggestion systems in e-commerce to even the current hot topic: the presidential race.
The 2008 presidential election gives CIOs and other IT executives a choice of two major-party candidates who are interested in technology-related issues. While the US economy and the war in Iraq have dominated the debate between Republican nominee Senator John McCain and Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama, they have also hit on such IT hot buttons as telecommunications and tech jobs.