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Category: Internet

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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A plan to redesign the internet could make apps that no one controls

A plan to redesign the internet could make apps that no one controls

Will Douglas Heaven writes: In 1996 John Perry Barlow, cofounder of internet rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote “A declaration of the independence of cyberspace.” It begins: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Barlow was reacting…

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The next big privacy hurdle? Teaching AI to forget

The next big privacy hurdle? Teaching AI to forget

Darren Shou writes: When the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) a year ago, one of the most revolutionary aspects of the regulation was the “right to be forgotten”—an often-hyped and debated right, sometimes perceived as empowering individuals to request the erasure of their information on the internet, most commonly from search engines or social networks. Since then, the issue of digital privacy has rarely been far from the spotlight. There is widespread debate in governments, boardrooms,…

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Tech giants led by Amazon, Facebook and Google spent nearly half a billion on lobbying over the past decade

Tech giants led by Amazon, Facebook and Google spent nearly half a billion on lobbying over the past decade

The Washington Post reports: Ten years ago, Google executives rarely spoke to Congress. Amazon employed just two of its own registered lobbyists in Washington. And Facebook had only recently graduated to a real office after running its D.C. operation out of an employee’s living room. Since then, though, these technology companies have evolved into some of the most potent political forces in the nation’s capital, a Washington Post analysis of new federal records reveals, with just seven tech giants accounting…

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How to survive the internet in 2020

How to survive the internet in 2020

Farhad Manjoo writes: The new year is here, and online, the forecast calls for several seasons of hell. Tech giants and the media have scarcely figured out all that went wrong during the last presidential election — viral misinformation, state-sponsored propaganda, bots aplenty, all of us cleaved into our own tribal reality bubbles — yet here we go again, headlong into another experiment in digitally mediated democracy. I’ll be honest with you: I’m terrified. I spend a lot of my…

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Google exec pushed company to commit to human rights. Then Google pushed him out

Google exec pushed company to commit to human rights. Then Google pushed him out

The Washington Post reports: For years, Google tasked Ross LaJeunesse with executing its plan to protect human rights in China, after Google announced a decade ago it would stop censoring search results there to safeguard security and free speech. LaJeunesse took the mission to heart: He later devised a human rights program to formalize Google’s principles supporting free expression and privacy. He began lobbying for it internally in 2017 — around the time when the tech giant was exploring a…

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UN backs Russia on internet convention, alarming rights advocates

UN backs Russia on internet convention, alarming rights advocates

AFP reports: The United Nations on Friday approved a Russian-led bid that aims to create a new convention on cybercrime, alarming rights groups and Western powers that fear a bid to restrict online freedom. The General Assembly approved the resolution sponsored by Russia and backed by China, which would set up a committee of international experts in 2020. The panel will work to set up “a comprehensive international convention on countering the use of information and communications technologies for criminal…

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Connecting rural America to broadband

Connecting rural America to broadband

Sue Halpern writes: Before Shani Hays began providing tech support for Apple from her home, in McKee, Kentucky, she worked at a prison as a corrections officer assigned to male sex offenders, making nine dollars an hour. After less than a year, she switched to working nights on an assembly line at a car-parts factory, where she felt safer. More recently, Hays, who is fifty-four, was an aide at a nursing home, putting in a full workweek in a single…

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