PopTech Blog

Egyptian activist Shima’a Helmy joined filmmakers Micah Garen and Marie-Hélène Carleton onstage at PopTech 2011 to talk about their collaboration on the upcoming documentary film, If, which explores what it’s like being a young revolutionary through the eyes of four different Egyptian women, including Helmy.

Following their talk, we had an opportunity to sit down with Helmy one-on-one in Camden to get her thoughts on where the revolution is headed. We've excerpted the interview here:

If the iconic image of protest in the 60's is a hippie slipping a flower into a gun barrel, the image for this generation's protest may be a Muslim woman wearing a Hijab and holding up a cell phone.

Shima'a Helmy is one of the young Egyptians who led that country's uprising in January of 2011. Using social media, street canvassing and her own steely determination to change her country for the better, 21-year old Helmy forewent her studies to help galvanize a revolution. The rest is quite literally history. 

PopTech: Can you speak to the dichotomy between being a devout Muslim and being an agent for change? How do these things influence each other, guide each other?
Shima'a Helmy: I think if you look deep inside the real essence of Islam, you'll see that it revolves around the fact that the Muslim is supposed to be a positive person in his or her society. They should help others, they should be cooperative, and they should try to be as positive as they can.

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You wouldn’t leave your door unlocked when you’re not at home. Yet, you probably do the online equivalent every day, exposing your bank account, inbox, social network – even your very identity - to the prying eyes of hackers.

After all, in this digital age, protecting our privacy comes down to those simple strings of characters that cause no end of grief: passwords. So we routinely commit the deadly sins of password protection—picking passwords that are easy to guess, using the same ones for multiple purposes, and never bothering to change them—even though we know better.

I recently stumbled across Top 1000 Passwords—a simple visualization of the one thousand most popular passwords extracted from a few leaked databases—that drives this point home. The folks at Dazzlepod, a web development company, created the Wordle to remind us just how easy it is for a hacker to take a leaked database and extract from it pairs of e-mail addresses and passwords. It's constructed from data on more than 400,000 users.

(They detail how to crack passwords here.) 

The top 5 passwords?

1. 123456 (appearing more than 5,000 times)
2. password
3. 123456789
4. qwerty
5. 12345678

Read more...

2011 Social Innovation Fellow Dominic Muren is looking out for the makers of the world, the people "that are creating things that the market can't create for them because it won't or can't." His organization, Humblefactory, develops tools and design approaches which assist these folks where mainstream manufacturing can't because of the large-scale capital, space, or scope that tends to be required.

During Muren's PopTech talk, he walks through a number of examples of makers that are carving their own path -- and those who have been helped along by Humblefactory. Follow along with links to these makers, craftspeople, and DIY-ers as you watch Muren's PopTech talk.

• Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and their Eggbot, an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball to that of a small grapefruit
• The DODO iPad case, the "Rolls Royce of iPad cases"
• Suzanne Lee and the bacteria cellulose fabric she uses to create clothing
• RepRap, the 3-D desktop printer and community project focused on making self-replicating machines
• The Skin-Skeleton-Guts manufacturing framework, which allows hardware to be repaired, upgraded, or customized much more easily than existing devices

As Muren concludes, these project matter because, "someday a maker might make you smile, someday a maker might save your job, someday a maker might save your city. Maybe someday you'll be a maker."

The International Harbin Ice and Snow Festival is a three-month event held in Harbin, in China’s northern Heilongjiang province, which opened Friday, January 5.

via L.A. Times

Photo: Diego Azubel/EPA

by Chris DeLuca

With its user-friendly interface, Twine is a small box that empowers non-programmers and those with limited coding knowledge to create their own DIY electronics projects.  Working out of the MIT Media Lab, John Carr and David Kestner designed the device to respond to a change in its environment and trigger a response or relay that information via text, Twitter, or email.

Twine is connected to a web application where users can input their desired variables. The simplified web app is a rules-based interface, which lets you quickly set up your notifications in real-time and take action once the variable has been met. The basic formula is: if something happens, then tell Twine to perform an action.  For example, if you set up Twine to notify you when the temperature in your house drops below a certain point, Twine can then be programmed to turn on your heating. Read more...