Media in Middle East & North Africa

Is the creative freedom ubiquitously expressed on the internet an ersatz expression for real change? Or is it accelerating knowledge and thereby progress?

How many photos of you are there on Facebook that you’re completely unaware of? Israeli-based Face.com will help you find them with ‘Photo Finder,’ a Facebook app that uses facial recognition to help members locate untagged photos of themselves and their friends.

Face.com claims to be able to perform facial recognition on all one billion photos currently uploaded into Facebook every single month using only a few machines.

I am an example of how far-reaching the effects of war could be. My grandfather on my father’s side left his home, which is now part of Israel, to pursue an education in Egypt. He wasn’t able to return and was issued a refugee document (passport). My other grandfather left for work to Saudi Arabia and was also issued a refugee document. Until today, most of my extended family, which I never knew or never met, still live in the Gaza Strip, where 70% of its 1.5 million people are refugees from ’48 and ’67. Imagine having your house destroyed, twice. I am hoping that one day I could meet them. The chances aren’t looking good.

The console is not meant to directly compete with the latest, powerful devices like Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, or the Wii. Rather, said Zeebo CEO John F. Rizzo, it is targeted at consumers in emerging markets like India, China, Brazil and Eastern Europe who generally can't afford the latest high-end consoles, or the games published for them. In many of these countries, cell phone service is more readily available and cheaper than wired broadband.

Zeebo hopes that by improving on systems like Mega Drive and offering wireless downloads of games, it will attract the emerging middle classes of India, China and Brazil to modern video games.

Syria’s use of a kangaroo court to criminalize even the mildest forms of dissent and free speech

"All new technologies hit this point," says Mike Butcher, editor of the new media blog Tech Crunch Europe, who has been using Twitter for almost three years. "You always have these old crusties who have been on it for a while, and then a generation of 'newbies' turn up as if it's something they have just invented." The scale of the exponential boom in Twitter's popularity, however, is "really unusual", he says. Far from killing off the site's popularity among early adopters, he argues that "the power of any network grows exponentially as the number of people using it grows." A world in which many more people are tweeting, and those tweets are fully searchable, would potentially allow a real-time search facility of "the consciousness of the planet".

The IDF say 1,166 Palestinians were killed during the conflict, of whom 709 were "terror operatives". A Palestinian rights group says the toll was 1,434, including 960 civilians, 235 fighters and 239 uniformed police.

The famous, of course, have turned to ghostwriters for autobiographies and other acts of self-aggrandizement. But the idea of having someone else write continual updates of one’s daily life seems slightly absurd.

for candidates like Mr. Paul, Twitter is an organizing tool rather than a glimpse behind the curtain.

the truth is, they are a brand.

The government's approach to the issue of privacy is not unlike a rat hooked on heroin. It just can't get enough of our personal information.

The government promises not to look at the content of messages themselves, and restrict itself to who communicates with whom. This seems ludicrous. If two terrorist suspects are emailing each other frequently, on Facebook or anywhere itself, it's difficult to believe security services won't try to discover the content of the messages. Somewhere in the legislation – either in an amendment to RIPA or a clause of the communications data bill – there will be a power, in 'exceptional circumstances' to read content. And 'exceptional circumstances' tend to become much less exceptional than originally intended.