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How to secure remote digital workspaces during and after the pandemic

Here are the most important factors in securing an enterprise in a remote access world.

When the pandemic hit, companies scrambled to get remote workers up and running. Security, while not ignored, didn’t get the consideration it deserved. We are past that now.

“This pandemic has been a wake-up call to double down on your employees’ ability to do their job on any device from anywhere at any time of day,” says Tim Ferrell, master cybersecurity architect at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “You now have these unmanaged, unsecured, and untrusted devices, and they’re all attempting to connect into what is a normally very secure corporate or, in some cases, government agency network. You can see it just dramatically increases the amount of risk in the environment.”



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Bootstrapping the data on COVID-19

How a group of Silicon Valley designers, epidemiologists, and public policy wonks created a tool for truth in their spare time.

On Tuesday, March 17, 2020, Joseph Ensminger received a text message asking if he could make time to help launch a data platform that projects COVID infections, hospitalizations, and deaths across the United States. The first step was getting in front of people who could make the necessary public health decision: America’s legislators, private sector leaders, and public health officials. The challenge was that this list did not yet exist.



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How Africa grew more than 200 local tech scenes

Before 2010, Africa had a handful of tech hubs. Botswana had its Innovation Hub; Pretoria, South Africa had its Innovation Hub; and there were a few more places that served to actively encourage the development of digital technology on the continent. Now, five years later, there are 220, according to an exhaustive list maintained by Fab Lab.

From the Centre Songhai in Benin to the Hypercube Hub in Zimbabwe, there are tech hubs, business incubators, hacker spaces, and maker spaces, all of which serve as indicator species for the health of Africa’s tech ecology. They offer collaborative spaces for programmers, nerds, entrepreneurs, and designers who can usually join on an affordable sliding scale and gain access to excellent connectivity, technology, and training.

The big question is, why? Why has this specific expression of the continent’s digital zeitgeist come out on top? How was it even possible?



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Lidar archaeology shines a light on hidden sites

If you think archaeologists spend all the time with trowel in hand in a muddy ditch then it’s time to think again. More and more are using sophisticated aircraft-mounted lasers, and it is opening up a new age of discovery.

For the best part of 25 years, archaeologists Arlen and Diane Chase slogged through the thick undergrowth in the west of Belize in search of an ancient city whose details had been lost to the passage of time and the decay of the jungle.



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Fighting for Freedom of the Keyboard

The number of blogs around the world has jumped from 5.4 million two months ago to 7.5 million today, according to the blog search engine Technorati. They are read by an estimated 32 million people a day.

Inside the United States, these websites can range from the mundane — an exhaustive documentation of the activities of one’s cat — to provocative columns that are starting to break news and transform the national debate.



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