As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective will they understand it from? Who is teaching them? "Objective" descriptions of the world and the relationships in it can cause real problems, particularly for people with little power in those relationships. How will the emerging Semantic Web understand relationships and what will that mean for us as human users?

The solution urged by the experts is to abandon passwords — and to move to a fundamentally different model, one in which humans play little or no part in logging on. Instead, machines have a cryptographically encoded conversation to establish both parties’ authenticity, using digital keys that we, as users, have no need to see.

This month, Microsoft is offering Web surfers in the United States a seductive viewing treat. In conjunction with NBC, the software publisher is offering thousands of hours of free video direct from the Olympics in Beijing.

Dean Kamen has unveiled the latest iteration of his power and water package for the third world. The two components are a water purifier called Slingshot that uses a fraction of the power of alternatives and a Stirling engine based power generator that works on cow dung. The $1500 water purifier will produce 1000 liters of water a day, while the $3,700 generator produces around 1 kW, which is enough to deliver light to a small village. The two products have been in development for years, but it looks as though they are now ready for more prime time consideration.

This course is intended to give newcomers enough background in the field of HCI to make their conference experience much more meaningful. It provides a framework to understand how the various topics are related to research and practice. It is a tried and true introduction and has become a CHI conference tradition.

Aurora is a concept video presenting one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series. Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios.

Design firm Adaptive Path worked with Mozilla Labs to create an engaging concept video, titled Aurora, to communicate a forecast of future Web-browing experiences.

At the 2007 EG conference, Kevin Kelly shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what's coming in the next 5,000 days?

A privately funded rocket was lost on its way to space Saturday night, bringing a third failure in a row to an Internet multimillionaire's effort to create a market for low-cost space-delivery.

When Akamai missed earnings estimates yesterday, they not only cited a slowing economy but also U.S. broadband bandwidth as a reason for poor earnings and forecasts. This brings up the serious issue of broadband infrastructure in the U.S. and the repercussions of ignoring a system that needs to be upgraded.