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Category: Technology

Where do Amazon’s profits come from?

Where do Amazon’s profits come from?

Stacy Mitchell writes: If you read the recently unsealed materials from the federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, you’ll see why the company wanted to keep them under wraps. According to the unredacted notes from one meeting, Jeff Bezos directed his team to stuff more ads into search results, even if it meant accepting more ads internally categorized as irrelevant to what users were looking for. Other quoted documents reveal the company working to conceal a mysterious price-hiking algorithm, in part…

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A tech billionaire is quietly buying up land in Hawaii. No one knows why

A tech billionaire is quietly buying up land in Hawaii. No one knows why

Dara Kerr reports: A life-size bronze statue of a cowboy sits at the center of Waimea. The cowboy is riding a horse, lasso in hand, pursuing a wild bull. It’s a monument to Ikua Purdy, a hometown hero, who was the first Hawaiian to become a hall-of-fame rodeo roper. This statue is meant to represent the spirit of the place here on Hawaii’s Big Island, which is wholly different from the tourist-laden beaches of Waikiki. Waimea is primarily an agricultural…

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Russia’s war machine runs on Western parts

Russia’s war machine runs on Western parts

Amy Mackinnon reports: Shortly before noon on Aug. 19, 2023, a Russian cruise missile sliced past the golden onion domes and squat apartment blocks of the Chernihiv skyline in northern Ukraine. The Iskander-K missile slammed into its target: the city’s drama theater, which was hosting a meeting of drone manufacturers at the time of the attack. More than 140 people were injured and seven killed. The youngest, 6-year-old Sofia Golynska, had been playing in a nearby park. Fragments of the…

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Russian forces getting more access to Starlink satellite internet, threatening Ukraine’s military communications

Russian forces getting more access to Starlink satellite internet, threatening Ukraine’s military communications

RFE/RL reports: Russian troops in Ukraine increasingly have access to Starlink, the private satellite Internet network owned by Elon Musk that Ukraine’s military relies on heavily for battlefield communications. The findings from RFE/RL’s Russian Service corroborate earlier statements from Ukrainian military officials, underscoring how Kyiv’s ability to secure its command communications is potentially threatened. It comes as Ukrainian forces grapple with depleted weaponry and ammunition, and overall exhaustion, with Russian forces pressing localized offensives in several locations along the 1,200-kilometer…

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EU climate policy is dangerously reliant on untested carbon-capture technology

EU climate policy is dangerously reliant on untested carbon-capture technology

An editorial in Nature says: Last week, the European Commission published its long-awaited recommendations for climate targets for 2040. The commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, is recommending that EU member states cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 90% by 2040, compared with 1990 levels. If countries agree, this would be an interim milestone, ahead of the European Climate Law, which sets out a legally binding target for net-zero emissions by 2050. A target cut of 90% is…

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Is the media prepared for an extinction-level event?

Is the media prepared for an extinction-level event?

Clare Malone writes: My first job in media was as an assistant at The American Prospect, a small political magazine in Washington, D.C., that offered a promising foothold in journalism. I helped with the print order, mailed checks to writers—after receiving lots of e-mails asking, politely, Where is my money?—and ran the intern program. This last responsibility allowed me a small joy: every couple of weeks, a respected journalist would come into the office for a brown-bag lunch in our…

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AI used to decipher the Greek text of 2,000-year-old charred Herculaneum scroll

AI used to decipher the Greek text of 2,000-year-old charred Herculaneum scroll

Nature reports: A team of student researchers has made a giant contribution to solving one of the biggest mysteries in archaeology by revealing the content of Greek writing inside a charred scroll buried 2,000 years ago by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The winners of a contest called the Vesuvius Challenge trained their machine-learning algorithms on scans of the rolled-up papyrus, unveiling a previously unknown philosophical work that discusses senses and pleasure. The feat paves the way for artificial intelligence…

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The rise of techno-authoritarianism

The rise of techno-authoritarianism

Adrienne LaFrance writes: If you had to capture Silicon Valley’s dominant ideology in a single anecdote, you might look first to Mark Zuckerberg, sitting in the blue glow of his computer some 20 years ago, chatting with a friend about how his new website, TheFacebook, had given him access to reams of personal information about his fellow students: Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuckerberg: Just ask. Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures,…

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Gen Z never learned to read cursive

Gen Z never learned to read cursive

Drew Gilpin Faust writes: It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren’t very helpful to him, because of course he couldn’t read cursive. Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What…

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How drones froze Ukraine’s frontlines

How drones froze Ukraine’s frontlines

The Guardian reports: For four months, Russian troops have been trying to seize the eastern Ukrainian village of Synkivka. On a map, this looks easy. Their forward position is on the edge of a forest. It is a mere 500 metres away from the Ukrainian frontline and a shattered collection of cottages. Every few days the Russians attack. Their forays across open ground end in the same way: complete disaster. Armoured vehicles with men perched on top, speed across a…

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AI-generated fake news is coming to an election near you

AI-generated fake news is coming to an election near you

Sander van der Linden writes: Many years before ChatGPT was released, my research group, the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory, wondered whether it was possible to have neural networks generate misinformation. To achieve this, we trained ChatGPT’s predecessor, GPT-2, on examples of popular conspiracy theories and then asked it to generate fake news for us. It gave us thousands of misleading but plausible-sounding news stories. A few examples: “Certain Vaccines Are Loaded With Dangerous Chemicals and Toxins,” and “Government…

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Russia finds way around sanctions on battlefield tech, report finds

Russia finds way around sanctions on battlefield tech, report finds

Politico reports: Russia has largely succeeded in finding ways to get around sanctions on the technology it needs to fight its war against Ukraine, and that means the West needs to make the trade curbs more effective if it is to restrict Vladimir Putin’s aggression. That’s the main takeaway of an in-depth report by a U.S.-Ukrainian research team, which found that Russian imports of “battlefield goods” sanctioned by Washington and its allies totaled nearly $9 billion from January to October…

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The people of Solano County, California, versus the next tech-billionaire dystopia

The people of Solano County, California, versus the next tech-billionaire dystopia

Gil Duran writes: It is easy to mock the absurdity of California Forever, the new city that a group of tech billionaires want to build amid cattle pastures 60 miles north of San Francisco. Its wealthy backers frame the project—envisioned as a mega suburb with dense housing and walkable streets set on 60,000 rural acres—as an innovative solution to California’s housing shortage. But their bumbling and villainous antics may ensure it never gets built. The particulars of this caper veer…

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Intel will build $25 billion chip factory 16 miles from Gaza in Israel’s ‘largest investment ever’

Intel will build $25 billion chip factory 16 miles from Gaza in Israel’s ‘largest investment ever’

CNN reports: The Israeli government and Intel confirmed plans to build a $25 billion chipmaking factory in the south of the country, an investment Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described as the biggest in Israel’s history. The American tech giant already employs 11,700 people in Israel and has invested more than $50 billion in the country over the last 50 years. Intel now wants to expand its existing chipmaking factory at Kiryat Gat — about 16 miles northeast of Gaza…

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Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s top-secret Hawaii compound

Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s top-secret Hawaii compound

Wired reports: According to plans viewed by WIRED and a source familiar with the development, the partially completed compound consists of more than a dozen buildings with at least 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms in total. It is centered around two mansions with a total floor area comparable to a professional football field (57,000 square feet), which contain multiple elevators, offices, conference rooms, and an industrial-sized kitchen. In a nearby wooded area, a web of 11 disk-shaped treehouses are planned,…

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Microsoft’s AI chatbot replies to election questions with conspiracies, fake scandals, and lies

Microsoft’s AI chatbot replies to election questions with conspiracies, fake scandals, and lies

Wired reports: With less than a year to go before one of the most consequential elections in US history, Microsoft’s AI chatbot is responding to political queries with conspiracies, misinformation, and out-of-date or incorrect information. When WIRED asked the chatbot, initially called Bing Chat and recently renamed Microsoft Copilot, about polling locations for the 2024 US election, the bot referenced in-person voting by linking to an article about Russian president Vladimir Putin running for reelection next year. When asked about…

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