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Category: Internet

The internet functions as a justification machine

The internet functions as a justification machine

Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield write: Try to remember for a moment how you felt on January 6, 2021. Recall the makeshift gallows erected on the Capitol grounds, the tear gas, and the sound of the riot shields colliding with hurled flagpoles. If you rewatch the video footage, you might remember the man in the CAMP AUSCHWITZ sweatshirt idling among the intruders, or the image of the Confederate flag flying in the Capitol Rotunda. The events of that day are…

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Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia

Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia

Molly White writes: When Elon Musk launched his latest crusade against Wikipedia this Christmas Eve, it wasn’t just another of the billionaire’s frequent Twitter tantrums. His gripes about the community-written encyclopedia expose something far more significant: the growing efforts by America’s most powerful right-wing figures to rewrite and control the flow of information. While Musk’s involvement began with grievances about his own coverage on the website, his recent attacks reveal his growing role in this broader campaign to delegitimize Wikipedia,…

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Net neutrality rules struck down by appeals court

Net neutrality rules struck down by appeals court

The New York Times reports: A federal appeals court struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s landmark net neutrality rules on Thursday, ending a nearly two-decade effort to regulate broadband internet providers as utilities. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, said the F.C.C. lacked the authority to reinstate rules that prevented broadband providers from slowing or blocking access to internet content. In its opinion, a three-judge panel pointed to a Supreme Court decision in June, known…

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How politics hung up a $42 billion Biden internet buildout

How politics hung up a $42 billion Biden internet buildout

Politico reports: President Joe Biden’s 2021 infrastructure law promised to help Virginia expand broadband internet to hard-to-reach corners of the commonwealth — investing nearly $1.5 billion to improve a key service across a swing state crucial to Democrats’ hopes in the November election. But so far, Virginia, like many states, hasn’t seen a cent of that money put to use. The state got news only in July that it was approved for funding — more than 10 months after completing…

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U.S. said to consider a breakup of Google to address search monopoly

U.S. said to consider a breakup of Google to address search monopoly

The New York Times reports: Google was found last week to have violated antitrust law by illegally maintaining a monopoly in internet search. Now discussions over how to fix those violations have begun. Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. They are discussing various proposals, including breaking off…

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FCC officially votes to reinstate net neutrality

FCC officially votes to reinstate net neutrality

TechCrunch reports: The Federal Communications Commission made its official vote Thursday to reinstate net neutrality, which bars broadband providers from slowing or even blocking internet traffic to some sites while improving access to others that pay extra fees. With some changes and protections, passing the order titled Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet restores rules passed back during the Obama administration in 2015 and rolled back in 2017, after Donald Trump was elected president. Since the FCC announced in September…

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The news business really is cratering

The news business really is cratering

Jack Shafer writes: Journalists across the country burst into flames of panic this week, as bad news for the news business crested and erupted everywhere all at once. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire publisher of the Los Angeles Times, laid off 20 percent of his newsroom. Over at Time magazine, its billionaire owners, Marc and Lynne Benioff, did the same for 15 percent of their unionized editorial employees. This latest conflagration had ignited at Sports Illustrated the previous week as catastrophic layoffs were dispensed via email to most staffers. Business…

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Amazon is the apex predator of our platform era

Amazon is the apex predator of our platform era

Cory Doctorow writes: The Federal Trade Commission’s chair, Lina Khan, has brought her long-awaited, audacious case against Amazon, signaling the Biden administration’s determination to restore an approach to competition law that has been in decline since the Carter administration. This will doubtless draw fresh criticism about her supposed overreach. But Amazon is precisely the kind of company that Congress had in mind in enacting America’s many antitrust laws. Only more so: The Congress of 1890, which passed the first of…

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The five most eye-opening lines in the antitrust lawsuit against Amazon

The five most eye-opening lines in the antitrust lawsuit against Amazon

Politico reports: A heavily redacted, 172-page lawsuit reveals how Amazon allegedly orchestrated a long-running campaign to muscle out competitors from the online retail space by financially squeezing merchants who rely on its platform. It’s a landmark case that will cement the legacy of FTC Chair Lina Khan, who first gained public attention going after Amazon. It’s also a key pillar in the Biden administration’s push to curb the alleged monopoly power of the nation’s largest tech companies. “There is immediate…

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Quantum computers could break the internet. Here’s how to save it

Quantum computers could break the internet. Here’s how to save it

Emily Conover writes: Keeping secrets is hard. Kids know it. Celebrities know it. National security experts know it, too. And it’s about to get even harder. There’s always someone who wants to get at the juicy details we’d rather keep hidden. Yet at every moment, untold volumes of private information are zipping along internet cables and optical fibers. That information’s privacy relies on encryption, a way to mathematically scramble data to prevent any snoops from deciphering it — even with…

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James Block helped take down crypto exchange, FTX, in his spare time

James Block helped take down crypto exchange, FTX, in his spare time

Charlie Warzel writes: The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby. James Block, who runs a crypto newsletter called Dirty Bubble Media, has gotten overlooked in the swift and spectacular collapse of FTX. On November 2, a report…

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The value of deliberate ignorance when there is too much to know

The value of deliberate ignorance when there is too much to know

Joshua Benton writes: Eyeballs. That’s what everyone on the internet seems to want — eyeballs. To be clear, it’s not actual eyeballs, in the aqueous humor sense, that they’re looking for. It’s getting your eyeballs pointed at whatever content they produce — their game, their app, their news story, whatever — and however many ad units they can squeeze into your field of view. Your attention is literally up for auction hundreds or thousands of times a day — your…

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How Google’s ad business funds disinformation around the world

How Google’s ad business funds disinformation around the world

By Craig Silverman, Ruth Talbot, Jeff Kao and Anna Klühspies Google is funneling revenue to some of the web’s most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa, a ProPublica investigation has found. The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the first ever conducted at this scale, documented how Google’s sprawling automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread false claims on such…

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After Ukraine, Biden administration turns to Musk’s satellite internet for Iran

After Ukraine, Biden administration turns to Musk’s satellite internet for Iran

CNN reports: The White House has engaged in talks with Elon Musk about the possibility of setting up SpaceX’s satellite internet service Starlink inside Iran, multiple officials familiar with the discussions told CNN. The conversations, which have not been previously reported, come as the Biden administration searches for ways to support the Iranian protest movement that exploded just over a month ago after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died under suspicious circumstances after being detained by the country’s morality police. The White…

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How a single Texas ruling could change the web forever

How a single Texas ruling could change the web forever

Charlie Warzel writes: Occasionally, something happens that is so blatantly and obviously misguided that trying to explain it rationally makes you sound ridiculous. Such is the case with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’s recent ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton. Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the…

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Undersea internet cables can detect earthquakes — and may soon warn of tsunamis

Undersea internet cables can detect earthquakes — and may soon warn of tsunamis

Jeffrey Marlow writes: Somewhere beneath the Adriatic Sea, a rogue block of the African tectonic plate is burrowing under southern Europe, stretching Italy eastward by a few millimetres each year. On October 26, 2016, the stress triggered an earthquake in the Apennine Mountains, one in a series of quakes which toppled buildings in Italian towns. On the day of the tremor, Giuseppe Marra, a principal research scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England, was running an experiment that…

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