Smartphones as extensions of us.

It has now quite become the norm that everywhere you go you will find people staring at their glaring smartphone screens. Teenagers and young adults would be flickering through various social media while those in the business world go through their emails and interact with other professionals. Our lives have become so centered on this piece of technology that it has moved from being a luxury to a basic necessity.

Smartphones

When cellphones first surfaced in Zimbabwe, they were mostly a luxury reserved for the elite. It used to be the businessman, the doctors and lawyers who carried this large brick like gadget which the average person could only see if they were lucky to sit to a person who had one. They started get a bit advanced when Nokia which was the biggest phone manufacturer in the world, introduced the Snake game in its phones and people could customize their ringtones with polyphonic tones. Mobile phones started getting a bit sophisticated when they started having color displays, could play a couple of songs and some even spotted some low end camera at the back.

 Phones have become smarter enough for people to organize their entire lives around them. A typical day for an average smartphone user involves getting woken up by their phone’s alarm clock, checking for any new mail and messages, plugging in their earphones on their way to work or school, while updating their Facebook profiles, tweeting all that they know and googling what they don’t. It is as if people have actually become more connected through smartphones by becoming disconnected to their immediate surroundings.

People now would now rather chat with someone far away and stay oblivious of those close to them. The popularity of mobile applications such as Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram just serves to show how people how people have become heavily dependent on their smartphones for social interaction.

Since phones have become such a basic tool of communication, it is not uncommon to see children as young as 10 years old carrying an iPhone. Although this is a good thing, it can expose kids to harmful content on the internet, for instance pornography, because of the internet is now easier to access. Also most children also appear to be more tech savvy than their parents; therefore there is no censoring them on what they can access and what kind of websites they visit. These are just some of the negative effects smartphones have brought upon society.

On the other hand, there is no denying that smartphones have improved and made our lives much easier. Communicating with whomever you want has become easier, learning new things has never been easier with the world at your literally at your fingertips.  There is a plethora of smartphone applications all aimed to make your life much simpler. Weather apps will give you weather updates, fitness apps will keep you healthy while maps and GPS apps will ensure that you never get lost. Smartphones have literally managed to fit into every aspect of our lives.

Smartphones have also brought opportunities to those interested in bringing their ideas to life. People can create apps, and you can literally create an app for anything. There are currently over a million applications on Apple’s App store and over a million on Google’s play store and the numbers will keep rising. Although a few of them actually make money, a lot of people have managed to benefit from building mobile applications. Flappy Bird maker, Dong Nguyen for instance was making up to $50,000 a day from probably one of the simplest mobile games out there before he pulled it down. 17 year old Nick D'Aloisio sold his news app to Yahoo for $30 million. This just goes on to show the opportunities smartphones have brought about. 

Smartphones have brought about great changes in society, they have changed have the way in which we live as we now center our lives around this piece of technology.

Turkey Blocks Twiitter

Turkey recently blocked access to Twitter following its Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s promise to “root out” the social media platform. The ban is reported to be a response to recordings leaked online that could dent the government’s reputation toward the country’s upcoming elections. This has however not done much tothe usage of Twitter in the country as people have found ways and shared instructions to access the service using text messages. 

                                           

Apparently a recording of Erdoğan having a phone conversation with his son was leaked on YouTube. In the recording Erdoğan speaks to his son, making plans to hidemoney, at least a $1 billion dollars in several houses. The Prime Ministry released a statement saying that the recordings were “completely false” and will take action against those responsible for the plot. Blocking Twitter therefore is a way of blocking people from talking about the issue.

Turkish telecoms watchdog BTK said the ban came because Twitter was breaching user’s privacy and was therefore made to “avoid possible victimisation of citizens.”

However Erdoğan had previously made threats against sites such as Facebook and YouTube. Erdoğan said “we would wipe out all of these,” as he addressed his supporters at a rally.

Turkey has joined a number of countries that have censored Twitter, which governments have a tendency of blocking. China does not allow Twitter in the country and in Egypt the site was inaccessible for a week during the uprisings in 2011. The social media platform has become more of a tool for revolutions and to fight government tyranny around the world.

News of the blocking immediately spread across Twitter, even generating a trending hashtag, #TwitterisblockedinTurkey. The site was blocked at a DNS level which is particularly easy to work around. Ways to get past these restrictions started being shared across social networks.

The ban presents a gloomy picture for Turkey as the country becomes more authoritarian and joins countries such as Iran and South Korea that have put restrictions on Twitter.

How much privacy do you have online.

There has been a recent rise in paranoia over who is watching you online following Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) monitoring people’s phone calls. Apparently the NSA was able to monitor the phone calls of 35 world leaders. If they can hack into world leaders’ phone calls, you are pretty much assured they can hack into anyone’s personal information. So should some regular guy working at convenience store worry about someone watching his Google searches on how to pick up girls or is it only the “important” people that should be scared.

The whole idea of someone being able to follow your online activity and collecting your data just makes the idea using phones and the internet a bit less comfortable. Especially now in an age where most of our lives revolve around the internet, looking through someone’s browser history can reveal some information some wouldn't want shared with the world. (Spare a thought for the poor Muslim radicalisers who had their online porn habits spied on.)

Apparently some websites are able to track your online activity and use the information for advertising purposes or financing other sites. Mozilla came up with its Lightbeam tool that lets users of the Firefox browser keep track of who is watching their browsing habits. It enables users to see third party companies that monitor their online activates in order to target them with advertising and presents the information as a real time graph.

                                          

Lightbeam for Firefox

                                         

Quite a number of companies have jumped on board in creating techs that attempt to guide your privacy. Geeksphone recently revealed a new phone dubbed the Blackphone. The phone is said to enable users to make encrypted calls and texts as well as anonymously browse the web. The phone is aimed at “people from all works of life who are concerned with privacy. It can be normal users from the street, or politicians or whatever,” said Javier Aguero, the company’s CEO.

                                      

Blackphone

Boeing, is also in the works of making a phone targeted at government agencies that offers encryption and will self-destruct if tampered with. It will however only be available to certain organisations only.

But despite all these developments to people’s privacy, will you ever be truly safe and have your privacy online. Well, apparently that will never happen. The makers of the Blackphone admit that their device is not NSA-proof and whatever you do with your browser will always be tracked.

I guess that’s just downside of technology.

  

Watch what your share on Social Networks.

Recently a friend of mine posted a picture of themselves smoking weed on Facebook and it got me wondering. How much information about ourselves our letting out on the internet. Are we being too social with a bunch of strangers on social networks?  Our lives are now so dependently integrated with the internet that sometimes we do not stop and wonder its implications on our privacy. Shouldn’t we keep some parts of our lives to ourselves rather than sharing them with the whole world?

People have now become so keen on sharing every aspects of their lives on social networks that by just checking on someone’s Facebook page you can learn almost every aspect of their lives. Following them on Twitter will give you real time updates about what they are doing, even if it’s a simple silly thing such as eating a banana. Surely the world won’t lose much if other some information was kept private, no one wants to know that you ate a stale burger and spent a whole Tuesday throwing up. More so some employers now make it standard practice to do background checks of potential employees before hiring. So that picture of you binge drinking and snorting drugs won’t do much good for your job prospects. What we share online can later come back to haunt us in the future.

Justine Stucco lost her job after her racist insensitive tweet went viral online even her own father called her an “idiot.” Her employers, IAC, a major media company fired her and she went on to delete her Twitter account. A bit too late for that, but that just goes on to show that the less information shared the better, less is more.

Obviously as humans we enjoy sharing a good story or two but sometimes it can become a little too much. Hewlett Packard’s former VP, Scott McClellan gave away too much information on his LinkedIn profile which tipped off competitors on the company’s cloud computing services, resulting in a loss of revenue. Social networks have enabled people to gather information which traditionally required some undercover work to retrieve.

You need to be careful about what we are putting online, think before posting anything. You should make sure that what you post will not be revealing any secrets or anything that is likely to come back and torment you. Once something gets on the internet deleting it a few hours later won’t do you much good so post responsibly.

Computers and us

Recently there has been a rise in new technologies having health related features that can tell you to hit the gym when you have been sitting on the couch for too long, such as the recently launched Samsung Galaxy S5. This is all of course aimed at making you healthier and that you have sufficient exercise. Add this to robot servants and the imminent self-driving cars and you have a future were you practically don’t have to do much. (That is if you can at least afford some of these devices.)

As computers continue to become smarter and smarter, we will find that people will have less to do. Computers will not rely heavily on continuous human instructions but will instead be able to learn from their own experiences and mistakes and improve from that.Designers say this style of computing will allow for robots that can walk and drive safely in the physical world, and also computers could start performing some of the basic human such as speaking and navigating.

Google is still working on its driver less cars, which are able to navigate and drive around without a human driver. The cars are powered by a software called Google Chauffeur. The cars are mounted with a laser radar which enable the vehicles to generate a three dimensional map of the environment. The car then compares these laser maps with high resolution maps of the world, producing data models that allow the car to drive itself. Pretty cool. 

                                   

GOOGLE Drive less cars.

                                                        

Just imagine knocking off from  work, chauffeured home by your Google car, jumping on your couch and have your maid cook your favorite, pork ribs and mash, except your maid isn’t exactly human. IBM has been working on a computer that thinks like people and has come up with the IBM food Truck. The computer is able to come up with its own recipes, and instructs chefs to prepare meals that have never been prepared. (If only they could they could fit a pair of arms and legs, it would make for the perfect girlfriend)

                                                                              

                                       

IBM food Truck.

Since these computers are starting to look more and more like the robots from science fiction movies shouldn’t we be worried about them rebelling against us and taking over the world like they do on TV. Since computers such as NOMAD, which has its own stimulated brain cells, continue to become smarter surely they will have to rebel one day, right? Kevin Warwick, author of March of the Machines: The breakthrough of Artificial Intelligence states that since computers are able to multitask and have a superior knowledge base in ways impossible to biological beings, this may give them opportunities to become much more powerful than humans and displace them.

                                                  

                                    

Will they take over?

                                                                  

However most scientists say this is an unlikely scenario to happen, rather than taking over robots will be there to assist humans. Robots being models of human beings can never be better than humans in all aspects. Rather humans and machine will become mutually dependable.Hope so.