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Category: Internet

The staggering ecological impacts of computation and the Cloud

The staggering ecological impacts of computation and the Cloud

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate writes: Screens brighten with the flow of words. Perhaps they are emails, hastily scrawled on smart devices, or emoji-laden messages exchanged between friends or families. On this same river of the digital, millions flock to binge their favorite television programming, to stream pornography, or enter the sprawling worlds of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, or simply to look up the meaning of an obscure word or the location of the nearest COVID-19 testing center. Whatever your query,…

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Your attention didn’t whither away. It was stolen

Your attention didn’t whither away. It was stolen

Johann Hari writes: I went to Portland, Oregon, to interview Prof Joel Nigg, who is one of the leading experts in the world on children’s attention problems, and he told me we need to ask if we are now developing “an attentional pathogenic culture” – an environment in which sustained and deep focus is harder for all of us. When I asked him what he would do if he was in charge of our culture and he actually wanted to…

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People mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own

People mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own

John Timmer writes: Many of us make jokes about how we’ve outsourced part of our brain to electronic devices. But based on a new paper by the University of Texas at Austin’s Adrian Ward, this is just a variation on something that has been happening throughout human history. No person could ever learn everything they need to know. But that’s OK, according to Ward: “No one person needs to know everything—they simply need to know who knows it.” Over time,…

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Millions of people rely on Facebook to get online. The outage left them stranded

Millions of people rely on Facebook to get online. The outage left them stranded

MIT Technology Review reports: One of the last messages that Vaiva Bezhan sent on Facebook Messenger on Monday afternoon, Central European Time, was a bit of a cliffhanger—and incredibly time sensitive. The Lithuanian photojournalist is co-organizer of the Afghan Support Group, one of many volunteer initiatives trying by any means possible to help evacuate vulnerable Afghans in the wake of the Taliban takeover. She was writing to ask if she could add someone to a flight manifest for one of…

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The glue that holds the internet together is coming undone

The glue that holds the internet together is coming undone

Jonathan Zittrain writes: The internet’s distinct architecture arose from a distinct constraint and a distinct freedom: First, its academically minded designers didn’t have or expect to raise massive amounts of capital to build the network; and second, they didn’t want or expect to make money from their invention. The internet’s framers thus had no money to simply roll out a uniform centralized network the way that, for example, FedEx metabolized a capital outlay of tens of millions of dollars to…

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Drought-stricken communities push back against resource hungry data centers

Drought-stricken communities push back against resource hungry data centers

NBC News reports: On May 17, the City Council of Mesa, Arizona, approved the $800 million development of an enormous data center — a warehouse filled with computers storing all of the photos, documents and other information we store “in the cloud” — on an arid plot of land in the eastern part of the city. But keeping the rows of powerful computers inside the data center from overheating will require up to 1.25 million gallons of water each day,…

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Our democratic habits have been killed off by an internet kleptocracy

Our democratic habits have been killed off by an internet kleptocracy

Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev write: To read the diary of Gustave de Beaumont, the traveling companion of Alexis de Tocqueville, is to understand just how primitive the American wilderness once seemed to visiting Frenchmen. In a single month, December 1831, Tocqueville and Beaumont were on a steamship that crashed; rode a stagecoach that broke an axle; and took shelter in a cabin—one of them bedridden from an unidentified illness—while the nearest doctor was a two-day hike away. Yet they…

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Google to stop selling ads based on your specific web browsing

Google to stop selling ads based on your specific web browsing

The Wall Street Journal reports: Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry. The Alphabet Inc. company said Wednesday that it plans next year to stop using or investing in tracking technologies that uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the internet. The decision, coming from the world’s biggest digital advertising company, could help push the industry away from…

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The internet rewired our brains. Michael Goldhaber predicted it would

The internet rewired our brains. Michael Goldhaber predicted it would

Charlie Warzel writes: Michael Goldhaber is the internet prophet you’ve never heard of. Here’s a short list of things he saw coming: the complete dominance of the internet, increased shamelessness in politics, terrorists co-opting social media, the rise of reality television, personal websites, oversharing, personal essay, fandoms and online influencer culture — along with the near destruction of our ability to focus. Most of this came to him in the mid-1980s, when Mr. Goldhaber, a former theoretical physicist, had a…

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The takedown of a dark-web marketplace

The takedown of a dark-web marketplace

Ed Caesar writes: You could buy pretty much any contraband you desired on DarkMarket, an online marketplace that was shuttered last week: illegal drugs, counterfeit passports, malware. The site, a kind of eBay for the dark Web, ran on Tor, the encrypted software that allows users to communicate with one another without betraying their real-life identities or I.P. addresses. Europol, which helped to coördinate an international investigation of the site, recently described DarkMarket as the largest illicit marketplace in the…

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Antitrust lawsuits: U.S. and states say Facebook illegally crushed competition

Antitrust lawsuits: U.S. and states say Facebook illegally crushed competition

The New York Times reports: The Federal Trade Commission and more than 40 states accused Facebook on Wednesday of buying up its rivals to illegally squash competition, and they called for the deals to be unwound, escalating regulators’ battle against the biggest tech companies in a way that could remake the social media industry. Federal and state regulators of both parties, who have investigated the company for over 18 months, said in separate lawsuits that Facebook’s purchases, especially Instagram for…

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The data economy is facing a social reckoning

The data economy is facing a social reckoning

MIT Technology Review reports: Each innovation challenges the norms, codes, and values of the society in which it is embedded. The industrial revolution unleashed new forces of productivity but at the cost of inhumane working conditions, leading to the creation of unions, labor laws, and the foundations of the political party structures of modern democracies. Fossil fuels powered a special century of growth before pushing governments, companies, and civil society to phase them out to protect our health, ecology, and…

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Google’s star ethics researcher highlighted the risks of large language models — then she got forced out

Google’s star ethics researcher highlighted the risks of large language models — then she got forced out

MIT Technology Review reports: On the evening of Wednesday, December 2, Timnit Gebru, the co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team, announced via Twitter that the company had forced her out. Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them. She also cofounded the Black in AI affinity group,…

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Pushed by pandemic, Amazon goes on a hiring spree without equal

Pushed by pandemic, Amazon goes on a hiring spree without equal

The New York Times reports: Amazon has embarked on an extraordinary hiring binge this year, vacuuming up an average of 1,400 new workers a day and solidifying its power as online shopping becomes more entrenched in the coronavirus pandemic. The hiring has taken place at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle, at its hundreds of warehouses in rural communities and suburbs, and in countries such as India and Italy. Amazon added 427,300 employees between January and October, pushing its work force to…

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Microsoft takes down massive hacking operation that could have affected the election

Microsoft takes down massive hacking operation that could have affected the election

CNN reports: Microsoft has disrupted a massive hacking operation that it said could have indirectly affected election infrastructure if allowed to continue. The company said Monday it took down the servers behind Trickbot, an enormous malware network that criminals were using to launch other cyberattacks, including a strain of highly potent ransomware. Microsoft said it obtained a federal court order to disable the IP addresses associated with Trickbot’s servers, and worked with telecom providers around the world to stamp out…

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The supply of disinformation will soon be infinite

The supply of disinformation will soon be infinite

Renée DiResta writes: Someday soon, the reading public will miss the days when a bit of detective work could identify completely fictitious authors. Consider the case of “Alice Donovan.” In 2016, a freelance writer by that name emailed the editors of CounterPunch, a left-leaning independent media site, to pitch a story. Her Twitter profile identified her as a journalist. Over a period of 18 months, Donovan pitched CounterPunch regularly; the publication accepted a handful of her pieces, and a collection…

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