Kampuchea News

Kampuchea News aggregates Cambodian news from more than 30 local and international news sources. On an average day it collects about 100 stories in English and more than 600 in Khmer.

Stories in English are categorized by province and news section, such as business, politics, crime, weird, etc.

Top News is a human-curated section of the day’s most important stories.

Kampuchea News is largely a personal project that allows me to explore new topics like AI and machine learning and revisit familiar ones like speed optimisation, javascript and PHP.

Hence the term beta. There’s an ever-growing roadmap (and bug list), with better support for Khmer, story clustering and more. But as with all personal projects, sometimes work gets in the way 🙁

Check it out at Kampuchea News. And let me know what you think.

Non-human traffic rules the internet

The bots have won. The Inversion is upon us. More than half of all internet traffic is fake, or at least non-human. And our digital reality will never again be the same.

Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

In the future, when I look back from the high-tech gamer jail in which President PewDiePie will have imprisoned me, I will remember 2018 as the year the internet passed the Inversion, not in some strict numerical sense, since bots already outnumber humans online more years than not, but in the perceptual sense. The internet has always played host in its dark corners to schools of catfish and embassies of Nigerian princes, but that darkness now pervades its every aspect: Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real. The “fakeness” of the post-Inversion internet is less a calculable falsehood and more a particular quality of experience — the uncanny sense that what you encounter online is not “real” but is also undeniably not “fake,” and indeed may be both at once, or in succession, as you turn it over in your head.

Read the whole thing. Every sentence. It’s a disorienting gaze into our untrustable, shape-shifting future.

Cambodia: the state of tech

The Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German think-tank, brought together ten of the tech sector’s leading minds to survey the state of the industry. The result is a smart overview of the challenges facing the sector as well as several deep dives into some of the most important aspects facing the industry. The report includes 10 chapters:

  1. Cambodia’s Journey to Become a Digital Economy: The Current Landscape by Kanika Montha
  2. Embracing the Digital Economy: Policy Consideration for Cambodia by Pheakdey Heng
  3. Using Data to Drive Business Growth in Cambodia by Christopher Treshan Perera & Chhaya So
  4. The Future of Waste Management – Seizing the Potential of Digitalization by Lilli Tabea Albrecht
  5. Women in Cambodia’s Digital Economy: Key Challenges and Opportunities by Socheata Touch
  6. Policy vs. Privacy and Data Protection Implications: A Case of Cambodia by Ngoun Somaly
  7. Cambodian SMEs in the 4th Industrial Revolution: Government Policies and Opportunities by Lydet Pidor
  8. Digital Transformation in SMEs: Understanding the Challenges of German SMEs by Robert HĂśr
  9. China’s Techno-Utilitarian Experiments with Artificial Intelligence by Dev Lewis
  10. Content Popularity on Social Media Platforms: How Business Models and User Preferences Meet by Pablo Porten-CheĂŠ

The overall consensus is that Cambodia is not just behind but far behind in the race for digital supremacy. The country lacks in infrastructure, policy, education, and competitiveness, among several other markers. But there are bright spots and success stories, too.

The report should be required reading for anyone in the industry. It is available as a PDF from the KAS web site: https://www.kas.de/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=49d4d004-3b68-bad3-1d5b-78e7961adfa4&groupId=264850

Fonts on the web

For experienced Internet hands, the subtleties of font usage on the Web is probably old hat. But for many newcomers, it’s often a sour pill to swallow – the fonts you use on your computer every day cannot be used on your Web site.

glyphs

In the earliest days of the Web, the number of fonts available to Web designers counted about five. Beautiful typography was non-existent. The source of the problem lied in the fact that when a designer specified a font – Arial, Helvetica or Times New Roman, for example – that font had to be installed on the computer of the user visiting the web site or the font simply couldn’t be displayed. It was impossible to know who might visit your Web site and what fonts he or she might have installed.

A solution was first proposed in 1998 with CSS2, but the techniques never caught on. It wasn’t until 2009 that a robust solution finally gained traction: the CSS3 Font Module, which allowed designers to send font files down the pipe just like images.

But there was a catch. A few actually, and not small ones.

For one, fonts are made by font designers who earn their living from making fonts. Many would not be able to eat if their products flourished freely across the Internet. Browser support was inconsistent, too, which made consistent display impossible at times.

By late 2010, however, most of those issues had been solved and a new era of Web typography was in full swing. Yet still the problem remained: the fonts you used on your computer every day could not be used on your Web site.

The reasons were two-fold. The first was mostly a technical issue. Many, if not all, of the fonts on your computer are optimized for print, not digital display. So they just don’t look right on the Web. They are too small, too rough. The other reason was a legal one: you only have the right to use, not distribute, the fonts on your computer.

Free public libraries

So what is the answer? Since web typography has spread, a handful of services have come along to help solve this issue. The two most notable ones are Google Fonts and Font Squirrel. The first offers a library of fonts freely available to use in all your digital projects. The second offers an easy way to package fonts you own into easily shareable web formats. And both are free.

Spend some money

It’s still likely, however, that most of the fonts you love are not available from the above services because of copyright issues. You can probably find them from paid services such as

Now that you have tons of fonts at your fingertips, take a little time and learn about font pairing and selection.

Your iPhone video to Wordpess web site in 2 seconds flat

The latest VideoPress upgrade rocks.

The VideoPress upgrade, which allows you to upload and embed your own videos on your blog, now comfortably handles videos from iPhones and iPads. You can shoot vertically or horizontally, and we’ll take care of rotating it for you so that your video looks great when it’s published on your site.

Yet another reason why WordPress is the best CMS ever.

Electronic tattoos

This is crazy mad — super-flexible, self-adhesive silicon circuit boards that can monitor your heart rate and more.

Known as epidermal electronics, they can be applied in a similar way to a temporary tattoo: you simply place it on your skin and rub it on with water (see video). The devices can even be hidden under actual temporary tattoos to keep the electronics concealed.

… Rogers and his colleagues have separately demonstrated that they can add other useful features to epidermal electronics. Solar cells could one day power the devices without an external source; meanwhile, signals recorded by the devices could be transmitted to a base station wirelessly with antennas. In the long term, Rogers believes the technology could provide an electronic link to the body’s most subtle processes, including the movement of enzymes and antibodies, to track the path of disease. “Ultimately, we think that [our] efforts can blur the distinction between electronics and biology,” he says.

The implications for health and medicine are profound. But even for more trivial considerations, the possibilities are truly staggering. Computers that “read” your thoughts are already far along in the testing stages. And a true union of mind and machine would surely create a class technology currently unimaginable.

 

Android stumbles out of starting gate

In the face of stellar iPhone and iPad sales, Android, the rival platform from Google, is struggling. The latest news is that a gaping security hole leaves nearly all Android users open to attack.

Researchers in Germany have found that most Android phones contain a dangerous security hole that, if exploited, would allow someone to access your accounts for certain Google services.

Elsewhere recently, Nvidia chief Jen-Hsun Huang has called out Google for its less-than-stellar tablet sales.

“It’s a point of sales problem. It’s an expertise at retail problem. It’s a marketing problem to consumers. It is a price point problem,” he said, for starters.

Though Huang didn’t mention the $499 starting price for the iPad, it was clear that this was a reference point. “The baseline configuration included 3G when it shouldn’t have,” he said. “Tablets should have a Wi-Fi configuration and be more affordable. And those are the ones that were selling more rapidly than the 3G and fully configured ones,” he said.

He didn’t stop there. “And it’s a software richness of content problem,” he added, echoing Jha’s comments.

IE9 due March 14

Microsoft will release Internet Explorer 9 on Monday. Says Webmonkey:

In terms of web standards IE9 is light years beyond anything Microsoft has previously released. Granted, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome are somewhat further along with the more experimental features of HTML5, but given IE’s dominant market share worldwide, IE9 should be a huge boon for HTML5 adoption (provided users upgrade).

By the sounds of it, Microsoft, after 10 years of trying, has finally produced a decent browser. Take a test drive.

 

Hackerspace Phnom Penh

Idle computer hands now have a place to play.

Hackerspace Phnom Penh will officially open in January 2011, giving the Phnom Penh IT community a common space to converge.

Hackerspace philosophy promotes the idea of knowledge sharing in an open, decentralized society. Dozens of Hackerspace groups exists worldwide. Collectively, the goal of the spaces is to provide “a location where people with common interests, usually in computers, technology, or digital or electronic art can meet, socialise and/or collaborate,” according to the Hackerspace entry on Wikipedia.

Hackerspace groups support themselves by collecting membership dues. Students in Phnom Penh, for example, pay just $10 per month to receive 24-hour access to the Hackerspace facilities, including high-speed Internet, community workspaces and audio-visual equipment.

“[W]e decided the best way to raise the capital is internally from future members and supporters of Hackerspace Phnom Penh, rather from private companies or organisations,” the founders wrote on the group’s Wiki. “This will ensure the independence of the Hackerspace which everyone at the first meeting thought was very important.”

Visit HackerspacePP.