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Category: Internet

Bitcoin: Are we really going to burn up the world for libertarian nerdbucks?

Bitcoin: Are we really going to burn up the world for libertarian nerdbucks?

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Eric Holthaus writes: The continued growth of power-hungry Bitcoin could lock in catastrophic climate change, according to a new study. The cryptocurrency’s growth, should it follow the adoption path of other widely used technologies (like credit cards and air conditioning), would alone be enough to push the planet to 2-degree C warming, the red line value the world agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate accord. Bitcoin essentially converts electricity into cash, via incredibly complex math problems designed to eliminate…

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Tim Berners-Lee launches campaign to save the web from abuse

Tim Berners-Lee launches campaign to save the web from abuse

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The Guardian reports: Tim Berners-Lee has launched a global campaign to save the web from the destructive effects of abuse and discrimination, political manipulation, and other threats that plague the online world. In a talk at the opening of the Web Summit in Lisbon on Monday, the inventor of the web called on governments, companies and individuals to back a new “Contract for the Web” that aims to protect people’s rights and freedoms on the internet. The contract outlines central…

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Dramatic slowdown in global growth of internet access will amplify existing inequalities

Dramatic slowdown in global growth of internet access will amplify existing inequalities

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The Guardian reports: The growth of internet access around the world has slowed dramatically, according to new data, suggesting the digital revolution will remain a distant dream for billions of the poorest and most isolated people on the planet. The striking trend, described in an unpublished report shared with the Guardian, shows the rate at which the world is getting online has fallen sharply since 2015, with women and the rural poor substantially excluded from education, business and other opportunities…

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Big Fail: The internet hasn’t helped democracy

Big Fail: The internet hasn’t helped democracy

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New research shows that more and more of our public conversation is unfolding within a dwindling coterie of sites that are controlled by a small few, largely unregulated and geared primarily to profit rather than public interest. Unsplash By Robert Diab, Thompson Rivers University Hardly a week goes by without news of another data breach at a large corporation affecting millions, most recently Facebook. In 2016, the issue became political with evidence of Russian interference in the U.S. election and…

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EU approves controversial Copyright Directive, including internet ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

EU approves controversial Copyright Directive, including internet ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

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The Verge reports: The European Parliament has voted in favor of the Copyright Directive, a controversial piece of legislation intended to update online copyright laws for the internet age. The directive was originally rejected by MEPs in July following criticism of two key provisions: Articles 11 and 13, dubbed the “link tax” and “upload filter” by critics. However, in parliament this morning, an updated version of the directive was approved, along with amended versions of Articles 11 and 13. The…

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The digital corruption of the human brain

The digital corruption of the human brain

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Maryanne Wolf writes: Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly,…

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The defamation case against Alex Jones

The defamation case against Alex Jones

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The New York Times reports: In the five years since Noah Pozner was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., death threats and online harassment have forced his parents, Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, to relocate seven times. They now live in a high-security community hundreds of miles from where their 6-year-old is buried. “I would love to go see my son’s grave and I don’t get to do that, but we made the right decision,”…

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The inventor of the World Wide Web and his mission to save it

The inventor of the World Wide Web and his mission to save it

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Katrina Brooker writes: “For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning in downtown Washington, D.C., about a half-mile from the White House. Berners-Lee was speaking about the future of the Internet, as he does often and fervently and with great animation at a remarkable cadence. With an Oxonian wisp of hair framing his chiseled face, Berners-Lee appears…

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Jaron Lanier is convinced that social media is toxic, making us sadder, angrier and more isolated

Jaron Lanier is convinced that social media is toxic, making us sadder, angrier and more isolated

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The Guardian reports: Many of the ideas in Jaron Lanier’s new book start off pretty familiar – at least, if you are active on social media. Yet in every chapter there is a principle so elegant, so neat, sometimes even so beautiful, that what is billed as straight polemic becomes something much more profound. The concept of random reinforcement, for example: addiction fed not by reward but by never knowing whether or when the reward will come, is well known….

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Facebook and Google hit with $8.8 billion in lawsuits on day one of GDPR

Facebook and Google hit with $8.8 billion in lawsuits on day one of GDPR

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The Verge reports: On the first day of GDPR enforcement, Facebook and Google have been hit with a raft of lawsuits accusing the companies of coercing users into sharing personal data. The lawsuits, which seek to fine Facebook 3.9 billion and Google 3.7 billion euro (roughly $8.8 billion in dollars), were filed by Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems, a longtime critic of the companies’ data collection practices. GDPR requires clear consent and justification for any personal data collected from users,…

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Human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence

Human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence

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Henry Kissinger writes: The internet age in which we already live prefigures some of the questions and issues that AI will only make more acute. The Enlightenment sought to submit traditional verities to a liberated, analytic human reason. The internet’s purpose is to ratify knowledge through the accumulation and manipulation of ever expanding data. Human cognition loses its personal character. Individuals turn into data, and data become regnant. Users of the internet emphasize retrieving and manipulating information over contextualizing or…

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Data centers, the factories of the digital age, emit as much CO2 as the airline industry

Data centers, the factories of the digital age, emit as much CO2 as the airline industry

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Yale Environment 360 reports: The cloud is coming back to Earth with a bump. That ethereal place where we store our data, stream our movies, and email the world has a physical presence – in hundreds of giant data centers that are taking a growing toll on the planet. Data centers are the factories of the digital age. These mostly windowless, featureless boxes are scattered across the globe – from Las Vegas to Bangalore, and Des Moines to Reykjavik. They…

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The fake news Russians hear at home

The fake news Russians hear at home

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Anne Applebaum writes: Because it touches us, because it involves the U.S. president, and because it has produced a lot of headlines, the strategy and tactics of Russian government disinformation in the West have lately been big news. Because it’s far away, and because it happens in a different language, we’ve thought a lot less about Russian government propaganda in Russia. But it will eventually matter to us — maybe sooner than we think. The transformation of Russian media hasn’t…

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Say goodbye to the information age — it’s all about reputation now

Say goodbye to the information age — it’s all about reputation now

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By Gloria Origgi, Aeon There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we rely on so-called reputational devices to evaluate it. What makes this paradoxical is that the vastly increased access to information and knowledge we have today does not empower us or make us more cognitively autonomous. Rather, it renders us more dependent on other people’s judgments and evaluations…

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How merchants use Facebook to flood Amazon with fake reviews

How merchants use Facebook to flood Amazon with fake reviews

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The Washington Post reports: On Amazon, customer comments can help a product surge in popularity. The online retail giant says that more than 99 percent of its reviews are legitimate because they are written by real shoppers who aren’t paid for them. But a Washington Post examination found that for some popular product categories, such as Bluetooth headphones and speakers, the vast majority of reviews appear to violate Amazon’s prohibition on paid reviews. Such reviews have certain characteristics, such as…

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The internet promised utopia and instead gave us Trump

The internet promised utopia and instead gave us Trump

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Noah Kulwin writes: To keep the internet free — while becoming richer, faster, than anyone in history — the technological elite needed something to attract billions of users to the ads they were selling. And that something, it turns out, was outrage. As Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, points out, anger is the emotion most effective at driving “engagement” — which also makes it, in a market for attention, the most profitable one. By creating a self-perpetuating loop…

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