(this is a guest post by Emanuel Pastreich, director of The Asia Institute, and Professor at Kyung Hee University. The post, originally published at Truthout, in April 2014, is now reposted here on invitation of the author, to whom I am grateful. My own proposal for a better alternative to Facebook and similar services is here)
FBI says that Apple must help them, because nobody else can do it, to unlock the iPhone used by San Bernardino shooter. The complete story is quite more complex than this one-sentence summary, but there is **one **part of it that, as far as I can see has received almost **zero **attention so far (*):
About 25 years ago I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. For whatever reason, one of the things that impressed me the most was the passage in which Asimov portrays the power of (automatic?) mathematical analysis to discover the real meaning of some text (1):
The online petition of the week, at least in Europe, is called “Internet for Democracy - Shut Down the Europarliament. Now!". I will not sign it, and I recommend everybody to do the same. However, I do suggest that everybody reads it because it’s about very general issues that you should really, really think about.
