Government Technology

The Internet today connects roughly 2.7 billion people around the world, and booming interest in the "Internet of things" could result in 75 billion devices connected to the web by 2020. The myth of cyberspace as a digital utopia has long been put to rest. Governments are increasingly developing smarter ways of asserting their national authority in cyberspace in an effort to control the flow, organization, and ownership of information.

Summer 2017: computer screens go blank in 150 countries. The NHS is so affected that hospitals can only take in patients for A&E. Ambulances are grounded. Computer screens turn on spontaneously and warnings appear. Employees who desperately pull the plugs are too late. Restarting is pointless; the computers are locked. And now the attackers ask each victim for money. This is hijack software. It is just one example of how vulnerable the digital world has made us.

In the World War II era, Geoffrey Pyke was described as one of the world's great minds - to rank alongside Einstein. Pyke was an inventor, adventurer, polymath, and unlikely hero of both world wars. He earned a fortune on the stock market, founded an influential pre-school, wrote a bestseller, and came up with the idea for the US and Canadian Special Forces. Henry Hemming is the first reporter to sift through this extraordinary new information and finally tell Pyke's astonishing story in full: his brilliance, his flaws, and his life of adventures, ideas, and secrets.

This book is a clear and informative introduction to cryptography and data protection - subjects of considerable social and political importance. It explains what algorithms do, how they are used, the risks associated with using them, and why governments should be concerned. Important areas are highlighted, such as Stream Ciphers, block ciphers, public key algorithms, digital signatures, and applications such as e-commerce.

A former US Navy intelligence officer, David Locke Hall was a federal prosecutor when a bizarre-sounding website, CRACK99, came to his attention. It looked like Craigslist on acid, but what it sold was anything but amateurish: thousands of high-tech software products used largely by the military, and for mere pennies on the dollar. Want to purchase satellite tracking software? No problem. Aerospace and aviation simulations? No problem. Communications systems designs? No problem.

Uncover everything you need to know about "deepfakes" and what could become the biggest information and communications meltdown in world history.

An innovation expert illuminates why your power to make a difference is no longer bound by your status. In The Power of Onlyness, Nilofer Merchant, one of the world's top-ranked business thinkers, reveals that we have now reached an unprecedented moment of opportunity for your ideas to "make a dent" on the world.

Big Pharma is more interested in profit than health. This was made clear as governments rushed to produce vaccines during the Covid pandemic. Behind the much-trumpeted scientific breakthroughs, major companies found new ways of gouging billions from governments in the West while abandoning the Global South. But this is only the latest episode in a long history of financializing medicine—from Purdue's rapacious marketing of highly addictive OxyContin through Martin Shkreli's hiking the price of a lifesaving drug to the 4.5 million South Africans needlessly deprived of HIV/AIDS medication.

The US Army entered World War II unprepared. Lacking Germany's blitzkrieg approach of coordinated armor and air power, the army was organized to fight two wars: one on the ground and one in the air. Previous commentators have blamed Congressional funding and public apathy for the army's unprepared state. David E. Johnson believes instead that the principal causes were internal: army culture and bureaucracy, and their combined impact on the development of weapons and doctrine.

In Programmed Inequality, Marie Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, labor problems grew into structural ones, and gender discrimination caused the nation's largest computer user to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole.

Maria Ressa has spent decades speaking truth to power. But her work tracking disinformation networks seeded by her own government, spreading lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate, has landed her in trouble with the most powerful man in the country: President Duterte. Now, hounded by the state, she has 10 arrest warrants against her name, and a potential 100+ years behind bars to prepare for - while she stands trial for speaking the truth.

In The Drone Age, Michael J. Boyle addresses some of the biggest questions surrounding the impact of drones on our world today and the risks that we might face tomorrow. Will drones produce a safer world because they reduce risk to pilots, or will the prospect of clean, remote warfare lead governments to engage in more conflicts? Will drones begin to replace humans on the battlefield? Will they empower soldiers and peacekeepers to act more precisely and humanely in crisis zones? How will terrorist organizations turn this technology back on the governments that fight them?

In Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging.

Causes of Decline & Collapse: Topics are; Economy, Political, Healthcare, Government, Technology, Religion, Military, President, Culture, Inequality, Terrorism. The Conclusion provides the saving grace for humanity.

Todo lo que no quieres pero necesitas saber sobre el poder, la economía, la sociedad y las telecomunicaciones en la era de la información.

Why is the internet so broken, and what could ever possibly fix it? In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. It's time to demand an internet by and for the people.

Praise for: Solving Global Warming Will Kill the Fossil Fuel Industry Literary Titan Gold Book Award Winner … an urgent and thorough exploration of what happens when one of the world's most powerful industries meets its inevitable decline. The book isn't just about climate change, it's about the economic, social and geopolitical political tremors that will follow the fall of fossil fuels. Miezejeski takes readers through the science of energy and history of industrialization and the strategies that oil and gas companies are using to cling to relevance. This is more than just a warning ...

Online disinformation stormed our political process in 2016 and has only worsened since. Yet as Samuel Woolley shows in this urgent book, it may pale in comparison to what's to come: humanlike automated voice systems, machine learning, "deepfake" AI-edited videos and images, interactive memes, virtual reality, and more. These technologies have the power not just to manipulate our politics, but to make us doubt our eyes and ears and even feelings. Deeply researched and compellingly written, The Reality Game describes the profound impact these technologies will have on our lives.

As the data economy grows in power, Carissa Véliz exposes how our privacy is eroded by big tech and governments, why that matters and what we can do about it. The moment you check your phone in the morning you are giving away your data. Before you've even switched off your alarm, a whole host of organisations have been alerted to when you woke up, where you slept and with whom. As you check the weather, scroll through your 'suggested friends' on Facebook, you continually compromise your privacy.

The recent coronavirus pandemic proved that the time-old notion seems now truer than ever: that science and politics represent a clash of cultures. But why should scientists simply "stick to the facts" and leave politics to the politicians when the world seems to be falling down around us? Drawing on his experience as both a research scientist and an expert advisor at the center of government, Ian Boyd takes an empirical approach to examining the current state of the relationship between science and politics.